Check back soon for details about the 2016 program.
Qualcomm's three European research centers in Cambridge, Germany and Austria ran their own fellowship programs. Each winning student received a fellowship in the amount of £10,000 for Cambridge and €10,000 each for Germany and Austria for the upcoming academic year, plus assignment of a Qualcomm researcher as mentor to facilitate close collaboration and interaction with Qualcomm Corporate Research & Development. We had three winners from each research center location and for the first time we had a European champion winner for the student with the most innovative proposal from the three participating European QInF locations.
We believe that research and development is the key to harnessing the power of imagination and to discovering new possibilities. We are excited to announce a new kind of Fellowship that promotes Qualcomm’s core values of innovation, execution and partnership. Our goal is to enable students to pursue their futuristic innovative ideas.
We will be awarding Fellowships to three winning students for the 2015-16 academic year.
Each of the three winning students will be awarded a £10,000 fellowship for submitting the most innovative proposals. The respective academic departments at each university will administer funds to the winning students for their fellowship work and research expenses for the academic year of 2015–16. Total funding for three students x £10,000 each = £30,000.
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See FAQs for more details.
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1. Finalists selection: Applications must be submitted online by the deadline noted in the Timeline tab. Each application must include (in PDF or Word format):
2. Winners selection: Finalist must prepare a 15-minute presentations for the judges. Presentation must be in PowerPoint or PDF format. The presentation generally includes:
The official rules for the Innovation Fellowship are available for download.
Please check back to this page regularly for application and program updates.
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In addition to the faculty advisor(s) to guide the fellowship research, Qualcomm will also provide industry experts to mentor the students, as well as regular collaboration opportunities with Qualcomm Research & Development to further assist with projects. Successful projects will be reevaluated after one year for further research funding from Qualcomm.
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Do you need further Information? Please direct your questions to: innovation.fellowship.cambridge@qti.qualcomm.com
Qualcomm is inviting applications for the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2015 from outstanding PhD students in the following departments/divisions at Cambridge University and Imperial College, London:
The following shows a set of focus areas for this year, but outstanding proposals in other areas will be considered as well:
Note: We also welcome proposals in other areas since we are very keen to learn about things we do not know!
Sure, but they are encouraged to find a like-minded faculty to recommend the innovation.
Yes, students who start PhD in the Autumn of 2015 are also eligible to apply for the Fellowship. The advisor’s recommendation can mention that the student is registered for Autumn.
None.
Unfortunately, visiting scholars are not eligible to apply for the Fellowship at this time. You are welcome to discuss your proposal and be guided by your visiting scholar associate or your faculty advisor.
Sure, just go through the application process twice and submit two completely different sets of applications.
Since this is a research focus fellowship, we are limiting this to PhD students. This means that each student must be enrolled in the PhD program for the whole academic year of 2015–16 to win the Fellowship (i.e., enrolled into a PhD program starting Autumn 2015 AND continuing in the PhD program until Spring 2016).
Students need to be enrolled in a full-time PhD program for the entire academic year 2015-16.
Approximately three (3) pages.
Students / University
Students / University
The proposal can indeed be different from your thesis.
There is no strict requirement on how much time you are expected to spend on your project. We expect the winning projects to be interesting and exciting enough that the winners will want to spend time on the project. In addition to the Fellowship, Qualcomm will assist by providing a mentor, and the recommending faculty would be another likely resource for help. Internships in the Summer are also possible.
No, both types of proposals are welcome.
Not at all. It could be pure research.
yes. That’s just a list of suggested areas, but proposal should not be limited to that.
We want the first recommender to be from the school. Second recommender may be from another school.
An open letter is preferred. But if your advisor wishes to keep it confidential, he/she can send the letter directly to innovation.fellowship.cambridge@qti.qualcomm.com, including the relevant details.
Not particularly, but 1-2 pages should be enough.
Qualcomm does not publish the winning submissions to QInF, but you are welcome to visit the winners’ webpages to learn more about their research.
The final winners are selected via a two step process: (i) reviewers from Qualcomm Research selects a list of finalists who should prepare a presentation about their proposal; (ii) after finalists presentation, the judging panel selects the winners.
Three winning students are each awarded a Fellowship of £10,000.
The winners get the title, and their department will appropriately reward the student and his/her research project via other possible means.
No, the department can roll it over to next year. Your department is completely flexible on how to use the money.
We are hoping that the fellowship applications will introduce us to new areas of research. As such, we explicitly encourage proposals in new areas that are not yet aligned with Qualcomm’s business interests.
Other than the Fellowship award, Qualcomm will also provide the following:
Of course! In fact, we encourage former applicants to submit new, or update their original proposal and resubmit it again using the provided proposal guidelines.
Yes! If you like to get feedback on your original proposal, please contact us (innovation.fellowship.cambridge@qualcomm.com) and we will set up a face-to-face or phone conversation to give you feedback on your proposal and how you can improve it for the current edition of QInF.
| School | Student(s) | Recommender(s) | Innovation Title |
| Computer Science Department at Imperial College, London | James Booth | Stefanos Zafeiriou | Automatic Construction of Massive-scale 3D Morphable Models |
| Cambridge University Department of Engineering | Marina Riabiz | Joan Lazenby, Simon Godsill | Bayesian Inference for the alpha-Stable Distribution |
| Cambridge University Computer Lab | Mark Florisson | Alan Mycroft | Interfaces for Communication Protocols |
| Cambridge University Department of Engineering | Mark van der Wilk | Prof. Carl Edward Rasmussen | Variational Inference and Kernel Bayes Rule |
| Cambridge University Department of Engineering | Yarin Gal | Prof. Zoubin Ghahramani | Scalable Probabilistic Representation Learning |
| Computer Science Department at Imperial College, London | Jeremy Riviere | Dr. Abhijeet Ghosh | On-site Acquisition of Surface Reflectance |
The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship began in 2009, and has continued to grow with the addition of more universities, more candidates, and expansion to our research centers internationally. Take a look at a list of all our fellowship winners and finalists from years past: