Google: Faculty Research Awards program

Google’s mission: organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. The intent of the Google Research Awards is to support cutting-edge research in Computer Science, Engineering, and related fields. Funding: up to $150K for one year (most awards are in the range of $40K-$70K - support for one student for one year). Each funded project will be assigned a Google sponsor. The role of the sponsor is to support the project by discussing research directions, engaging with professors and students, and overseeing collaboration between the project team and Google. Broad research areas of interest to Google:
Economics and market algorithms
Geo/maps
Human-computer interaction
Information retrieval, extraction, and organization
Machine learning and data mining
Machine perception
Machine translation
Mobile
Natural language processing
Networking
Policy and standards
Privacy
Security
Social networks
Software engineering
Speech
Structured data and database management
Systems (hardware and software)
http://research.google.com/university/relations/research_awards.html