Google Funding Social Network, Storage, Speech Research
By Jason Miller

Google has a reputation for spearheading or funding great research, and the company just announced funding three new research initiatives at Stanford, Virginia, and Carnegie Mellon universities.

At the Google Research Blog, Juan Vargas describes the three projects, chose via the company’s Research Awards Program, set up since 2005 to further worthy proposals. A project at Stanford, for example, will investigate social networks and evaluate problems like spam, trust, recommendations, and the nature of social interactions.

Recent trumped-up charges about the amount of energy Google searches require are likely a reason the company was keen to bring up its funding of energy-efficient storage architectures at Virginia. Researchers there are working on something they call “Intra-Disk Parallelism” they hope will reduce data center energy consumption by 60 percent.

The third one Vargas mentions is interesting because it relates to Google’s ongoing research in voice recognition. A study at Carnegie Mellon looks to advance speech recognition and synthetic voices. Google’s foray into free 411 calling was thinly veiled front for studying natural voices.

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