Pakistani Academics Win Google Research Award for AI Paper on Machine Perception
By Riaz Haq
Dr Mohsen Ali and Dr Izza Aftab have won Google Research Scholar Award 2021, according to an announcement on Google AI Blog.
Dr Ali is an assistant professor of computer science at the Information Technology University (ITU) in Lahore, Pakistan while Dr Aftab is an assistant professor of economics at the same university.
The Google Award is for a joint paper authored by the two Pakistani professors. It is entitled "Is Economics from afar Domain Generalizable?" that deals with the challenges of predicting economics indicators through machine learning.
Dr Izza Aftab's interests include theory and modeling of firm level innovation in developing countries, the economics of climate change, and role of big data in informing public policy. Dr Mohsen Ali's research interests include solving theoretical and practical problems entailing Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, specifically on the problems related to image co-segmentation, remote sensing, medical imaging and affective computing, according to ITU website.
Google introduced the Research Scholar Program in March 2020. It is "an effort focused on developing collaborations with new professors and encouraging the formation of long-term relationships with the academic community", according to Google AI Blog.
In response to a call to compete for the research award, Google received research papers from faculty who are working on cutting edge research across many research areas in computer science, including machine learning, human-computer interaction, health research, systems and more. Participants represented 50 universities in 15 countries, mainly in America and Europe but a few from Asia as well.
(Riaz Haq is a Silicon Valley-based Pakistani-American analyst and writer. He blogs at www.riazhaq.com)
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