Facebook will be awarding $30,000 fellowships to PhD students in “Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, System Architecture,” and “related fields.” In addition to the stipend students will receive $5,000 for attending conferences and $5,000 to purchase a computer. The fellowships are limited to students attending American universities, but foreign studenst may apply. So far, Facebook is only funding the fellowships for the 2010-2011 academic term,but may extend that.
Facebook says it is “interested in a range of academic topics” but has highlighted the following fields:
- Internet Economics: auction theory and algorithmic game theory relevant to online advertising auctions.
- Cloud Computing: storage, databases, and optimization for computing in a massively distributed environment.
- Social Computing: models, algorithms and systems around social networks, social media, social search and collaborative environments.
- Data Mining and Machine Learning: learning algorithms, feature generation, and evaluation methods to produce effective online and offline models of behavioral signals.
- Systems: Hardware, operating system, runtime, and language support for fast, scalable, efficient data centers.
- Information Retrieval: search algorithms, information extraction, question answering, cross-lingual retrieval and multimedia retrieval