The award is in support of Dr. Cameron's Research Proposal entitled "Unicode Level 2 Support in Parabix Regular Expression Matching".
Searching for patterns in text has been a fundamental use of computing technology for many decades.   While searching for individual words can be fast, some patterns may be very complex and slow to search.  Nowadays, the complexity of search is magnified by the pervasive use of Unicode, a system supporting all the characters of the world's languages.
Prof. Rob Cameron and his Software Systems team at the SFU Surrey campus have developed Parabix as a promising new technology for speeding up search and other forms of Unicode text processing.  To demonstrate the potential of Parabix methods, the team has developed ICgrep, a modern high-performance replacement for the Unix grep program.
http://parabix.costar.sfu.ca/wiki/ICgrep
With full support for Unicode level 1 requirements already achieved in ICgrep, the Google Faculty Research Award will allow Rob and his team to move on to the more challenging issues in Unicode level 2 pattern search.