Abdelkareem Bedri and Anjalie Field, Ph.D. students in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Language Technologies Institute, respectively, have received 2020 Google Ph.D. Fellowships. They are among 53 recipients this year worldwide.

The Google Ph.D. Fellowship Program recognizes outstanding graduate students doing exceptional and innovative research in areas relevant to computer science and related fields. In addition to providing tuition and a stipend, the program matches each fellow with a Google research mentor.

Bedri's research has focused on tracking physical activity and calorie intake, striving to make food tracking "as easy as tracking footsteps." He has built wearable devices powered with machine learning models to automatically detect eating and drinking activity, help identify food types, and estimate consumption.

Field's work focuses on developing social-oriented natural language processing (NLP) models. This has included research on detecting gender bias in social media and analyzing bias in narratives about the #MeToo movement. Her latest efforts involve a collaboration to analyze case notes written by social workers through the development of interpretable NLP models.