UT Computer Science professor Lorenzo Alvisi has been selected for the 2014 Google Research Award. Lorenzo, along with two other UT professors, will receive grants to expand their research.

The Google Research Awards are one-year awards structured as unrestricted gifts to universities to support the work of faculty members at universities around the world. The intent of the award is to support cutting-edge research in computer science, engineering, and other related fields.

The three awards will roughly total $170,000 and will go towards research ranging from driverless vehicles, to health care data crunching, to evaluating the child friendliness of Google’s search engine.

Lorenzo is currently working on developing a framework to make it easier to process more queries and data without requiring a massive reprograming effort.

With the grant from Google, he will work on his project that aims to apply his research to healthcare information technology through a partnership with a central Texas non-profit charged with providing technology solutions to local healthcare infrastructure.

Lorenzo received both his Bachelor’s from University of Bologn and his Master's and Ph.D. from Cornell. He currently teaches Distributed Computing Honors, which complements his research interest of dependable distributed computing.