Google Faculty Research Awards program

The purpose of this program is to facilitate more interaction between Google and academia and also nurture stronger relations and partnerships with universities. The intent of the awards program is to support academic research aimed at improving information access (defined broadly). Google funds Research Awards unrestricted and retains no intellectual property from the research. We prefer if the results from the research are open sourced and widely published. Awards through this program are for one year in the range from $10K-$150K. Areas that are of particular interest include (but are not limited to):
•  Economics and market algorithms
• Education innovation
• Geo/maps
• Human-computer interaction
• Information retrieval, extraction, and organization
• Machine learning and data mining
• Machine translation
• Mobile
• Multi-media search and audio/video processing
• Natural language processing
• Policy and standards
• Security and privacy
• Social systems
• Software Engineering
• Software and hardware systems infrastructure
• Speech
• Structured data and database management
Award recipients will be assigned a Google Sponsor, through whom they can discuss research directions, provide progress updates, engage in knowledge transfer, etc. Google maintains an academic environment that we would like to share with our award recipients, so we invite them to visit our facilities, to give talks related to their work, and to engage in discussions with our research groups. By sharing new ideas and key insights, we hope that both Google and award recipients will find mutual benefits.
http://research.google.com/university/relations/research_awards.html