We are happy to announce the results of the Mozilla Research Grant program for the second half of 2017. This was a competitive process, with over 70 applicants. After three rounds of judging, we selected a total of fourteen proposals, ranging from building tools to support open web platform projects like Rust and WebAssembly to designing digital assistants for low- and middle- income families and exploring decentralized web projects in the Orkney Islands. All these projects support Mozilla’s mission to make the Internet safer, more empowering, and more accessible.
The Mozilla Research Grants program is part of Mozilla’s Emerging Technologies commitment to being a world-class example of inclusive innovation and impact culture-and reflects Mozilla’s commitment to open innovation, continuously exploring new possibilities with and for diverse communities.
| Zhendong Su | University of California, Davis | Practical, Rigorous Testing of the Mozilla Rust and bindgen Compilers |
| Ross Tate | Cornell University | Inferable Typed WebAssembly |
| Laura Watts | IT University of Copenhagen | Shaping community-based managed services (‘Orkney Cloud Saga’) |
| Svetlana Yarosh | University of Minnesota | Children & Parent Using Speech Interfaces for Informational Queries |
| Serge Egelman | UC Berkeley / International Computer Science Institute | Towards Usable IoT Access Controls in the Home |
| Alexis Hiniker | University of Washington | Understanding Design Opportunities for In-Home Digital Assistants for Low- and Middle-Income Families |
| Blase Ur | University of Chicago | Improving Communication About Privacy in Web Browsers |
| Wendy Ju | Cornell Tech | Video Data Corpus of People Reacting to Chatbot Answers to Enable Error Recognition and Repair |
| Katherine Isbister | University of California Santa Cruz | Designing for VR Publics: Creating the right interaction infrastructure for pro-social connection, privacy, inclusivity, and co-mingling in social VR |
| Sanjeev Arora | Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study | Compact representations of meaning of natural language: Toward a rigorous and interpretable study |
| Rachel Cummings | Georgia Tech | Differentially Private Analysis of Growing Datasets |
| Tongping Liu | University of Texas at San Antonio | Guarder: Defending Heap Vulnerabilities with Flexible Guarantee and Better Performance |
The Mozilla Foundation will also be providing grants in support of two additional proposals:
| J. Nathan Matias | CivilServant, incubated by Global Voices | Preventing online harassment with Community A/B Test Systems |
| Donghee Yvette Wohn | New Jersey Institute of Technology | Dealing with Harassment: Moderation Practices of Female and LGBT Live Streamers |
Congratulations to all successfully funded applicants! The 2018H1 round of grant proposals will open in the Spring; more information is available at https://research.mozilla.org/research-grants/.
Jofish Kaye, Principal Research Scientist, Emerging Technologies, Mozilla
