Two MPI-SWS faculty, Maria Christakis and Elissa Redmiles, have earned highly competitive Google Research Scholar awards. Maria Christakis's award was given for her research on metamorphic specification and testing of machine-learning models and Elissa Redmiles's award was given for her research on aligning technical data privacy protections with user concerns.

The Google Research Scholar Program provides unrestricted gifts of up to $60,000 to support research at institutions around the world and is focused on funding world-class research conducted by early-career professors. Award proposals go through an internal, merit-based review process and selected faculty can receive a Google Research Scholar award only once in their career. Award recipients are assigned a liaison at the company to share findings with and as a point of contact for further collaboration.

Open Diffix is an MPI-SWS-supported open software project to develop strong but usable data anonymization. Open Diffix is built on the data anonymization technology Diffix, which has been developed in a research partnership between the group of Paul Francis and Aircloak GmbH. Open Diffix recently released its first tool, "Diffix for Desktop". Designed with extreme ease-of-use in mind, Diffix for Desktop can be used by non-experts to safely release sensitive data to the public. Diffix for Desktop frees users from concerns about anonymity, allowing them to focus on data quality.