Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. today recognized five of the best and brightest computer science and engineering students in the U.S. as it announced the inaugural class of the Samsung PhD Fellowship. Each student will receive a Fellowship award of $50,000 as well as mentorship to support their ground-breaking research.

The new PhD Fellowship program rewards those who dare to innovate. Jointly sponsored by Samsung Semiconductor and the Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center (SSIC), the program recognizes outstanding Ph.D. students working in five areas: Software and Memory System Solutions for Data Centers; Low-Power CPU and System IP Architecture and Designs; Advanced Semiconductor Devices, Materials and Simulation; Internet of Things; and Smart Machines.

Samsung launched the Fellowship program with a call for partner universities to nominate outstanding students working on the above topics. Twelve of the best-qualified nominees were selected as Finalists and invited to showcase events at the new headquarters in Silicon Valley or at the Samsung Austin R&D Center. Each student Finalist presented his or her research proposal to an audience of Samsung engineers, Lab directors, and innovation leaders and met many of them for interviews as well. Following these events, the five Fellows were selected from this terrific group.

Each Fellow will be connected to an engineer from one of the Samsung Semiconductor or SSIC Labs in Silicon Valley or Austin. This mentor will provide an industry perspective on their research and will invite the student to join Samsung for an internship.

“We are thrilled to be supporting these outstanding students through our Fellowship program. Samsung strives to be a leader in the creation of new technology, and a great way to do that is by supporting basic research and PhD training,” said Stefan Heuser, VP of Operations and Innovation for SSIC. “We were very impressed by the students nominated by the universities—all of them have made an impact in key areas of research. The Finalists were an even stronger group, and we are confident that they will become leaders in their fields. But the five Fellows are truly exceptional, and we look forward to working with them in the coming year. We thank the universities and all of the student nominees for their efforts and for their interest in our program.”

Following are the five Samsung PhD Fellows for 2016-2017:

• Dinesh Jayaraman, “Embodied Learning for Visual Recognition”
  Nominating professor: Kristen Grauman, University of Texas at Austin

• Jiajun Wu, “Computational Perception of Physical Object Properties”
  Nominating professors: William Freeman and Joshua Tenenbaum, MIT

• Joy Arulraj, “Rethinking Database Systems for Next-Generation Memory Technologies and Real-Time Analytics”
  Nominating professor: Andy Pavlo, Carnegie Mellon University

• Niranjini Rajagopal, “Sensor Fusion and Automatic Infrastructure Mapping for Indoor Localization Systems”
  Nominating professors: Anthony Rowe and Bruno Sinopoli, Carnegie Mellon University

• Wooseok Lee, “Exploring Future Mobile Heterogeneous Multicore System Architectures”
  Nominating professors: Lizy John and Andreas Gerstlauer, University of Texas at Austin

Nominations for next year’s PhD Fellowship program will open in September 2016. Additional information about the Fellowship program can be found at: http://www.samsung.com/us/labs/fellowship/index.html