2021 Google PhD Fellowship

Congratulations to Mr Kelvin Chan (left), Mr Hong Fangzhou (centre) and Mr Wang Zheng (right), for winning the 2021 Google PhD Fellowship!

The Google PhD Fellowship recognizes and supports PhD students doing exceptional and innovative research work in computer science and related fields. This year is the very first year that the fellowship is opened to graduate students in Southeast Asia. All three winners from NTU this year are from the School of Computer Science and Engineering. The other awardees include graduate students from top universities, including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, and more (https://research.google/outreach/phd-fellowship/recipients/).

Mr Kelvin Chan is supervised by Assoc Prof Loy Chen Change at MMLab@NTU and is currently in his Year 3 of PhD study. Kelvin’s PhD project is on image and video restoration. He has published his PhD work in top conferences, including AAAI2021 and CVPR2021, in the field of computer vision. Notably, his PhD work has also recently won three champions in the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement 2021 Challenge (NTIRE2021), the largest and most important competition on the restoration and enhancement of images and videos. Kelvin is also an active contributor to OpenMMLab, an open-source project for academic research and industrial applications.

Also from MMLab@NTU, Mr Hong Fangzhou is a first year PhD student, supervised by Asst. Prof Liu Ziwei. Fangzhou’s PhD project is on 3D representation learning. Fangzhou has already published two papers in CVPR2021 and one paper in NeurIPS2021, a truly commendable achievement for a junior PhD student.

Both Kelvin and Fangzhou are recipients under the “Machine Perception, Speech Technology and Computer Vision” area.

Mr Wang Zheng is supervised by Asst Prof Long Cheng (main supervisor) and Prof Cong Gao (co-supervisor) at DANTE@NTU and is currently in his Year 3 of PhD study. Zheng’s PhD project is on spatial and spatiotemporal data management and mining. Up to now, he has published over 10 conference and journal papers, including KDD2021, ICDE2021, ACL2021, WWW2021, VLDB2020, KDD2019, TKDE2018, and AAAI2017, which are all prestigious and top-tier publications in the areas of databases and data mining.

Wang Zheng is supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore under its AI Singapore Programme – AISG PhD Fellowship Programme (AISG Award No: AISG-PhD/2021-08-024[T]). He is also a recipient under the “Structured Data and Database Management” area of the Google Fellowship 2021 Award.