Apple is committed to supporting the academic research community and its invaluable contributions to the world. We offer fellowships, scholarships, and awards to graduate and postgraduate students who are harnessing the power of technology to help people and the planet.
Meet the Apple Scholars.
Apple University, in a joint program with Stanford University’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, hosts postdoctoral fellows whose research focuses on issues at the intersection of ethics and technology.
Abby is focused on the big questions at the intersection of human and artificial intelligence: What does it take to get tech right? And how do we make sure the technologies we build are good for everyone?
More about Abby Jaques
At MIT, Abby developed a new theory of the nature of intentional action. Now she is focused on how artificial intelligence can affect human behavior and its potential moral and political impacts. She has also developed a new, practice-based method of ethics for engineers, and she contributed to a series of grant-funded efforts aimed at democratizing AI through formal and informal education.
Awarded to emerging leaders pursuing research in areas related to electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science with a focus on cutting-edge technology and Apple core values.
McKenzie is working on novel computer architectures that would allow low-power IoT devices to participate in encrypted computing at the edge.
More about McKenzie van der Hagen
An enormous amount of data is collected and processed at every moment through Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It takes a lot of power to protect the privacy of everyone using connected technology. One way to address privacy in the world of IoT is through homomorphic encryption techniques, which enable computation directly on encrypted data. But that takes complex mathematics and huge data structures. McKenzie’s work aims to develop specialized computer architectures to support these massive operations within the modest constraints of low-power IoT devices. Ultimately she hopes to take the concept of encrypted computing from optimistic theory to practical reality through hardware support.
Jaya is using personalized machine learning and naturalistic data to help children with nonverbal autism spectrum disorder (ASD) communicate with the world around them.
More about Jaya Narain
Of the 3.5 million people in the United States who have ASD, about 30 percent are nonverbal. But that doesn’t mean they don’t communicate. Parents and caregivers can often interpret vocalizations, gestures, and differences in tone that may be missed by others. Jaya is using the knowledge that primary caregivers have to train machine learning models to help interpret nonverbal cues. She hopes that her research can have a profound impact on how children with nonverbal autism navigate their space and communicate with new people.