CIIR/CICS Phd (2019) alum Qingyao Ai is a recipient of a Google 2021 Research Scholar Program Award. He is one of 77 awardees in the inaugural year of the program. Qingyao, Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah, received the award for "Metric-agnostic Ranking Optimization" under the Google research area of Machine Learning and Data Mining. Another CICS alum, Aruna Balasubramanian, also received one of this year's Google Research Scholar Program awards.