Facebook fellowships for computing research: another win-win collaboration?

Just two days back we reported on Yahoo setting up a hadoop cluster in IIT Bombay, and now we have news of Facebook coming up with fellowships to PhD students researching topical areas in computing that are relevant to Facebook.

The relevant areas as per the Facebook blurb are:

• 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

It is pertinent to note that Facebook uses all these technologies and some of these like a online advertising auctions or IR and data mining are becoming more and more important for Facebook as it moves towards being a real-time profitable platform. However, it is surprising to note that real-time technologies are not much stressed in the project scope.

The fellowships are pretty decent and details about stipend etc  can be found on the Facebook page. The TechCrunch article mentions that there are only 5 fellowships and that these are open only to students studying in US, but I couldn’t not find the same information on the Facebook page, so interested students may like to contact Facebook directly in this regard.

Funding research programs, laboratories is a new type of win-win collaboration that is increasingly being seen in industry-academia ties when it comes to internet technologies. I am excited by the trend and hope that something fruitful comes out of this.