Google awards $500,000 to professors for web projects

Google announced last Tuesday that it will award five Princeton professors combined grants of $500,000 for their promising research on Internet energy efficiency and privacy.

The Google Focused Research Awards, which will total $5.7 million, are unrestricted grants for a period of two to three years.

Computer science professor Ed Felten will receive $400,000 for his research on internet privacy. A four-member team — composed of electrical engineering professor Margaret Martonosi, computer science professor Jennifer Rexford ’91, assistant computer science professor Michael Freedman and associate electrical engineering professor Mung Chiang — will receive $100,000 for their work on energy efficiency.

Felten’s research addresses the practice of web-activity tracking, employed by many online advertising sites to locate potential customers.

“When you surf the web ... the sites can try to connect what you do on this site to what you do on the next site,” Felten said. “By connecting these dots, they can build up a profile of you.”

Felten explained that Google wants to make use of the benefits of online activity tracking, yet at the same time preserve user identity and privacy. He added that Google is the largest provider of online advertising.

“As a service provider, [Google] can sometimes provide a better service by using information it got on one site to provide you better service on another site ... The problem right now is there is no effective way to tell those sites whether you want this or not,” Felten said.

Another part of Felten’s research focuses on maintaining user privacy across multiple synchronized devices.

“I have here a desktop computer, a laptop and an iPhone, and I want to read my mail on all of those ... The consequence is that the server knows everything about my e-mail,” Felten explained. “Right now, we’re looking at ways of providing these sorts of synchronized services across different platforms, while better protecting the users’ privacy.”

The team award is a response to Google’s growing environmental and financial concerns regarding power supply to its large server databases.

“Google’s infrastructure [is] comprising, by some estimates, as much power as the automobile manufacturing industry,” Freedman said, adding that a single Google data center might contain as many as 500,000 computers. “This power is both economically expensive and, from an environmental perspective, there’s the question of how you could do things more efficiently.”

Web-power consumption is rapidly increasing as businesses rely more heavily on the internet, Rexford explained.

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“We’re going to see the Internet become an increasingly large portion of the energy consumed, as it replaces other forms of energy-consuming activity like travel,” she said. “Video-conferencing, for example, could keep people from having to travel.”

Perhaps the central obstacle that the researchers face will be to find an optimal compromise between internet performance and efficiency, Chiang said.

“You can always shut down internet performance to achieve maximum efficiency ... but the difficult question we are addressing is, ‘How can you get the best set of trade-off points?’” Chiang explained.

Researchers said that the grants, in addition to financial support, have also enabled them to develop relationships within the industry.

“More than the money ... what [is] particularly good about the industrial connections is that they build more of a relationship with companies ... to better understand the challenges we face and which only a few places -— Google certainly among them — are uniquely qualified to understand,” Freedman said.