We are very happy to announce the results of the 2018H1 Mozilla Research Grants. This was an extremely competitive process, with over 115 applicants. We selected a total of eight proposals, ranging from tools to fight online harassment to systems for generating speech. 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. We will open the 2018H2 round in Fall of 2018: see our Research Grant webpage for more details and to sign up to be notified when applications open.

Principal Investigator Institution Department Title Jeff Huang Texas A&M University Department of Computer Science and Engineering Predictively Detecting and Debugging Multi-threaded Use-After-Free Vulnerabilities in Firefox Eduardo Vicente Gonçalves Open Knowledge Foundation, Brazil Data Science for Civic Innovation Programme A Brazilian bot to read government gazettes and bills: Using NLP to empower citizens and civic movements Leah Findlater University of Washington Human Centered Design and Engineering Task-Appropriate Synthesized Speech Laura James University of Cambridge Trustworthy Technologies Initiative Trust and Technology: building shared understanding around trust and distrust Libby Hemphill University of Michigan School of Information and Institute for Social Research Learning and Automating De-escalation Strategies in Online Discussions Pamela Wisniewski University of Central Florida Department of Computer Science A Community-based Approach to Co-Managing Privacy and Security for Mozilla’s Web of Things Munmun De Choudhury Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing Combating Professional Harassment Online via Participatory Algorithmic and Data-Driven Research David Joyner Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing Virtual Reality for Classrooms-at-a-Distance in Online Education

Many thanks to all our applicants in this very competitive and high-quality round.