One of the worlds largest social networking sites, Facebook, has announced a new Fellowship Programme to support students at US institutions studying Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, System Architecture, or a related area.

The $30,000 stipend will be accompanied by $5K per year toward conference attendance and travel, $5K toward a personal computer and the opportunity to apply for a paid summer internship.

A statement from Facebook said:

“Every day Facebook confronts the most complex technical problems and we believe that close relationships with the academy will enable us to address many of these problems at a fundamental level and solve them. As part of our ongoing commitment to academic relations, we are pleased to announce the creation of the Facebook Fellowship programme to support graduate students in the 2010-2011 school year.

We are interested in a wide range of academic topics, including the following topical areas:

• 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”

Perhaps of most interest to readers of i-studentadvisor is the news that the Fellowship has been made available to non-US students as well, provided they are enrolled at a US university and fulfill the other relevant criteria.

Applications must be submitted in full by February 15th, 2010. For more information on the Fellowship and details on how to apply, visit Facebook here.

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