Introducing the Twitch Research Fellowship
We’re excited to announce the inaugural Twitch Research Fellowship program!
If you’re a doctoral student pursuing innovative research in fields relevant to Twitch, you can apply for a $10,000 award prize and a paid visit to present your research at Twitch HQ for our Science Team and CEO, Emmett Shear. In addition, Fellows eligible for employment at Twitch will be invited to participate in a 10-to-12 week paid internship with Twitch Science in San Francisco.
We believe in fostering a diverse, global community, so we highly encourage students from traditionally under-represented minority groups to apply.
Eligibility Criteria
Applicants must be full-time PhD students currently enrolled in an accredited university.
Students must be enrolled and involved in ongoing research during the academic year in which the Fellowship is awarded.
Students’ work should be related to one or more of the research areas listed below.
Students should not be current or former employees of Twitch and should disclose if they have a close relative currently employed at Twitch.
Application Materials
Applications will be evaluated based on the strength of the student’s research statement, publication record, and recommendation letters.
Applications must include the following:
250- to 500-word research summary which clearly identifies the area of focus of the research activities to which this award will be applied. This summary should highlight not only the importance to the field, but also the applicability to Twitch.
Resume or CV with email, phone and mailing address, and applicable coursework.
Two letters of recommendation; please provide reference email addresses. One reference should be from a current academic advisor.
Research Areas
Applied Statistics. Areas of research may include, but are not limited to, causal inference, anomaly detection, forecasting and time series analysis, optimization, regression, classification, clustering, and experimentation.
Computational Social Science. Areas of research may include, but are not limited to, information diffusion and influence, community norms and safety, computer-mediated communication, well-being, and social support.
Computer Vision. Areas of research may include, but are not limited to, image and video recognition (classification, detection, and segmentation), human understanding (face, gesture, and pose identification), scene analysis and understanding, and methods for large-scale streaming video analysis.
Information Retrieval. Areas of research may include, but are not limited to, search and ranking, document categorization and clustering, domain-specific applications, conversational search systems, human factors, and evaluation.
Machine Learning. Areas of research may include, but are not limited to, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, and optimization.
Natural Language Processing & Speech. Areas of research may include, but are not limited to, machine translation, multilingual learning, acoustic event detection, speech recognition and synthesis, methods for analyzing short message text, summarization, and sentiment analysis.
Recommender Systems. Areas of research may include, but are not limited to, preference elicitation, algorithmic scalability and implementation, context-aware recommendations, interfaces and evaluation, user modeling, algorithmic bias, and ethics of recommender systems.
Additional Research Areas. We encourage applications from students working in areas outside those highlighted above, as long as they are relevant to Twitch.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I apply?
Applications will be open starting on September 1, 2019. You can apply by emailing the application materials listed above to fellowship-apps-2020@twitch.tv. Please ensure that your application contains all of the materials listed above, and please include your name and institution in the title of your email. We ask applicants to submit only once, so please ensure that your materials are completed and finalized before submitting.
What are the important dates for this program?
September 1, 2019: Application submissions are opened
October 1, 2019: Applications submissions are closed
December 1, 2019: Fellowship awards announced
Summer or Fall, 2020: Eligible awardees participate at Twitch as research interns with mentors.
Am I still eligible if I already have research funding?
Yes. However, if you are selected to receive the award, it is your responsibility to check with your existing funding source(s) to ensure that accepting the award will not impact your current support. In addition, it is your responsibility to ensure that accepting this award will not conflict with any of the rules or regulations of your university or local government.
Are there restrictions on how funds can be used?
Funds will be disbursed as an unrestricted gift to the student or the student’s current academic advisor. Applications should provide some explanation of how funds will be used to support the research activities described in the application. While this clearly includes costs associated with hardware, software, and data collection, we encourage applicants to consider other ways in which this funding could support their research, including conference travel, publication expenses, and childcare costs.
Will Twitch provide data to awarded students?
Twitch will not provide external access to data. Any data collected by students for external research activities must comply with both Twitch’s terms and policies and the institution’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). During the period of a Twitch internship, however, interns may be granted access to internal data sources. Researchers can, of course, make use of Twitch’s APIs to collect data as long as data collection complies with Twitch’s terms and policies, including the Developer Agreement.
How many Fellowships will Twitch award?
Twitch does not have a predetermined number of Fellowships that it intends to give out. Each application will be considered based on the novelty of the research, its relevance to Twitch and its business, and confidence that the proposed research can be completed.
Is participating in an internship required to accept the Fellowship?
We strongly encourage Fellows, where possible, to join us for an internship at Twitch, where they will have the opportunity to apply their research to solving large-scale problems in a fast-paced, industry environment. We recognize that some students may have constraints, such as concerns about work authorization, which may prohibit them from participating in an internship. As such, we do not strictly require students to commit to an internship in order to accept the Fellowship award.
What if I have questions about the Fellowship that aren’t answered here?
For any questions about the Fellowship or other research programs at Twitch, please send us an email at research-program-support@twitch.tv.