New Google Cloud Platform Education Grants offer free credits to students

We are excited to announce Google Cloud Platform Education Grants for computer science faculty and students. Starting today, faculty in the United States who teach courses in computer science or related subjects can apply for free credits for students to use across the full complement of Google Cloud Platform tools, without having to submit a credit card. These credits can be used anytime during the 2016-17 academic year.

Cloud Platform already powers innovative work by young computer scientists. Consider the work of Duke University undergrad Brittany Wenger. After watching several women in her family suffer from breast cancer, Brittany used her knowledge of artificial intelligence to create Cloud4Cancer, an artificial neural network built on top of Google App Engine. Medical professionals upload scans of benign and malignant breast cancer tumors. From these inputs, Cloud4Cancer has learned to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy tissue, providing health care professionals with a powerful diagnostic tool in the fight against cancer.

Familiarizing students with Cloud Platform will also make them more competitive in the job market. Professor Majd Sakr is a teaching professor in the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In his experience, students that have access to public cloud infrastructure gain valuable experience with the software and infrastructure used by today’s employers. In addition, student projects can benefit from the sheer scale and scope of Google Cloud Platform’s infrastructure resources.

Google Cloud Platform offers a range of tools and services that are unique among cloud providers, for example:

• Google App Engine is a simple way to build and run an application without having to configure custom infrastructure.
• Google BigQuery is a fully managed cloud data warehouse for analyzing large data sets with a familiar, SQL-like interface.
• Cloud Vision API allows computer science students to incorporate Google’s state-of-the-art image recognition capabilities into the most basic web or mobile app.
• Cloud Machine Learning is Google’s managed service for machine learning that lets you build machine learning models on any type or size of data. It’s based on TensorFlow, the most popular open-source machine learning toolkit on GitHub, which ensures your machine learning is not locked into our platform.

We look forward to seeing the novel ways computer science students use their Google Cloud Platform Education Grants, and are excited to share their work on this blog.

Computer science faculty can apply for Education Grants today. These grants are only available to faculty based in the United States, but we plan to extend the program to other geographies soon. Once submissions are approved on our end, faculty will be able to disperse credits to students. For US-based students out there interested in taking GCP for a spin, encourage your department to apply! If you want to get started immediately, there’s also our free-trial program.

Students and others interested in Google Cloud Platform for Higher Education should complete the form to register their interest and stay updated about the latest from Cloud Platform, including forthcoming credit programs. For more information on GCP and its uses for higher education, visit our Cloud Platform for Higher Education webpage.