Google to support R&D in Indian varsities

Google, which recently opened its R&D centre in Bangalore, has announced initiatives to promote research in Indian universities.

Google stated that be it a faculty member or a student who gets his research paper accepted for a few major computer science conferences globally, it will sponsor the candidate for the event.

Google has zeroed in on seven international conferences including the 14th International World Wide Web Conference, Conference on Management of Data, Association of Computational Linguistics, International Conference on Machine Learning, Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications besides the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles across the globe.

According to Google India, this is an initiative it is taking to identify talent in basic computer science engineering and is an effort to promote research.

The company also recently announced the winners of its India Code Jam contest, another initiative to identify talent in the South Asian region. Code Jam is an online programming competition in skills assessment and competitive software development.

Said a spokesperson for Google India: "The Google India Code Jam is a demonstration of the value Google places on excellent programming. In addition to celebrating the top programmers in the region, we also hope that the competition will provide further opportunities to attract strong computer scientists to our R&D centre here."

A student from Singapore, Adrian K Poernomo won the contest this year, which was the third Google Code Jam contest and the first in India.

"The India Code Jam is an extension of our annual Code Jam contest and celebrates the art of computer science, demonstrating to professionals everywhere the value Google places on coding," the spokesperson added.