Announcing the 2021 Google Cloud Customer Award Winners in Education and Research

Winner: Cignition. Cignition, a Google for Education Partner, built a data-informed and gamified tutoring platform backed by neuroscience and machine learning research to help K–12 students master course concepts and enjoy math. Math proficiency has long been stagnant, and underserved students have seen a decline. Cignition is helping to improve math skills and making its technology easily available to all students through its online portal.

Winner: Penn State World Campus. At Penn State World Campus, learners all over the world take classes online. A team of 48 full-time academic advisors spent a year tracking their advising workflows and discovered that staff consistently fielded the same questions, often spending 15 to 30 minutes collecting information for the answers. The team used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify processes that could be automated, and implemented a virtual assistant to provide responses to routine queries. Now, the majority of student questions can be answered in seconds, freeing up precious advisor time to spend with the students who need it most.

Winner: UNC Institute for Trauma Recovery. Healthcare workers can find it difficult to distinguish between the stresses and challenges of their work and illness. To help, Dr. Samuel McLean, director of the UNC Institute for Trauma Recovery, developed the Heroes Health app with colleagues at UNC and Harvard Medical School. The app enables frontline medical providers to assess their own mental health through brief weekly assessments, track their wellness through graphs of symptom severity over time, and get help through links to immediate crisis support and self-help tools.

Winner: Northwestern Neighborhood and Network Initiative. In the Chicago area, the Northwestern Neighborhood and Network Initiative (N3) – a research institute at Northwestern University – is using the power of big data to address core problems in the community. When the ever-growing volume of social science datasets presented challenges, N3 consolidated data into data tables, using Data Studio and BigQuery, which can be quickly accessed from any location. This achievement, which wins Northwestern the Social Impact Award, allows for better insights, more effective data sharing with community partners, and greater speed and efficiency to take meaningful action in neighborhoods.

Winner: The University of Chicago. The University of Chicago, recognized with an Education Industry Award and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award, is finding opportunities to transform how we think about representation and the messages we’re sending to children. A research team at the university’s interdisciplinary Messages, Identity, and Inclusion in Education lab (MiiE) developed open-source tools to better understand how to address disparities by measuring the representation of race, gender, and age in children’s books.

Winner: California Institute of Technology. The winning team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) are developing new computational tools to carry out high-resolution simulations of atmospheric turbulence, convection, and clouds.

While climate simulations can help researchers forecast risks, clouds create a great deal of uncertainty in climate predictions. By building a next-generation, open-source Earth System Model to reduce and quantify cloud uncertainties, Caltech and CliMA are changing the game for climate science and helping to improve our climate future.