Singh Receives 2018 Google PhD Fellowship

College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) graduate student Rachee Singh, a third-year Ph.D. student, has received a 2018 Google Ph.D. Fellowship in recognition of her promising research in improving the performance of wide-area networks (WANs). She is one of only 39 scholars across North America, Europe, and the Middle East named a Google Ph.D. Fellow this year.

The Google PhD Fellowship Program was created in 2009 in an effort to "recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional research in computer science and related disciplines." The 2-year fellowship covers tuition and provides a stipend for living expenses, travel, and computing equipment, as well as access to a Google Research Mentor.

"Google is pleased to announce the recipients of the Google PhD Fellowships for 2018," said Susie Kim, Google PhD Fellowships. "These awards have been presented to exemplary PhD students in computer science and related research areas. We have given these students unique fellowships to acknowledge their contributions to their areas of specialty and provide funding for their education and research. We look forward to working closely with them as they continue to become leaders in their respective fields."

Singh's doctoral research focuses on two broad areas 1) understanding and improving the performance of wide-area networks (WANs) and 2) enabling Internet freedom. Specifically, her research aims to improve the performance of commercial WANs and harnesses network path prediction to secure tools for anonymous communication online.

Her recent work focuses on changing the perception of fiber links in WANs by allowing their capacities to be programmable and adaptive to the quality of the optical signal. Equipped with this capability, networks would no longer have a notion of binary link states (link-up versus link-down), instead, links can reduce their capacities in case of degradation of signal quality or upgrade their capacities to meet traffic demands.

Singh is advised by Philippa Gill, assistant professor of computer science and head of the CICS Calipr research group.

Congratulations, Rachee!