Google has awarded $1.35 million to the University of Washington for research on mobile phones.

Researcher Gaetano Borriello won the three-year grant, which includes $900,000 up front and $450,000 per year. An engineer from the company will work directly with Borriello. His project is called "Open Data: Data Collection from Mobile Devices."

The grant is part of $5.7 million that Google is putting in to its Focused Research Awards, which target research into energy efficiency, machine learning, privacy and mobile phones. Machine learning -- that sounds a lot like the plot of "Terminator" to me. The company said in a statement it will continue to give up to 100 research grants annually.

Here is a link to the company's announcement on its research blog and a list of the other grant winners.

Update 11:51 a.m.:

The grant extends a project Borriello began last year with some students, working at Google's offices in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood to build an open-source Open Data Kit for Android, Google's mobile operating system. The kit can be used by people in developing countries to enter data on public health, micro finance or the fair-trade coffee market, for example.

"Google has traditionally given out a significant number of smaller research grants in a wide variety of areas," said Ed Lazowska, a professor at the UW Computer Science and Engineering Department. "They’re augmenting that with a more focused program."

Microsoft has been a long-term supporter of the University of Washington as well, giving more than $5 million over the past three years to support research with most of it going to the computer science department, Lazowska said. The company also gave $7.2 million to the capital campaign for the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering.