PhD candidate Hemant Surale is one of 11 recipients globally and the only candidate from Canada to receive a prestigious 2019 Snap Research Fellowship. These fellowships were established to foster collaboration between Snap Research and exceptional doctoral students across the world. Each fellowship recipient receives a $10,000 US award and an offer of a full-time paid internship with Snap.
Supervised by Professor Daniel Vogel, a member of the Cheriton School of Computer Science’s Human-Computer Interaction research group, Hemant’s doctoral research spans mixed reality interfaces to wearable computing to interaction design. He conducts formal experiments to investigate fundamental interaction challenges in mixed reality.
“I want to personally congratulate you for your selection as a 2019 Snap Research Fellow,” wrote Bobby Murphy, Snap’s Chief Technology Officer in the award letter. “This year, we chose 11 Fellows out of over 150 applicants from universities across the globe.”
Snap’s CTO continued that Hemant’s research has a “fascinating focus on input challenges in new interfaces. At Snap, especially for Spectacles, this is a great environment to explore novel interactions under very unique constraints.”
Snap selects outstanding students who conduct research in areas of computer science relevant to the company, such as computer graphics, computer vision, machine learning, data mining, computational imaging, human-computer interaction, among other related fields. Fellows and scholars are chosen based on the relevance and quality of their research, their technical and communication skills, and their understanding of how research initiatives can inspire future innovation.
“Hemant is the only Snap Research Fellowship recipient enrolled at a Canadian university,” said Professor Vogel. “Many of the other recipients are from the top computer science departments in the United States. This is an amazing accomplishment for Hemant and speaks highly of the quality of graduate education at the Cheriton School of Computer Science.”
“Congratulations to Hemant on this well-deserved fellowship,” said Mark Giesbrecht, Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “He has also been a recipient of the David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship for the past two years and with this fellowship from Snap, Hemant will be able to even further expand his exemplary HCI research.”
