Facebook is proud to announce the winners of the Facebook Graduate Fellowship Program. This year we received over 600 applications from promising PhD students studying at universities across the globe. This year’s cohort represents some of the most talented researchers across computer science and engineering disciplines. We are excited to learn more about their research, share our research with them, and support them as they complete their degrees.

Fellows

Aditya Vashistha, University of Washington

Aditya is a third year PhD student in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Washington where he design, build and evaluates technologies for underserved rural and urban communities in resource-constrained settings. Much of his research lies in the intersection of Social Computing and Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD). He is advised by Prof. Richard Anderson. Read More

Bolei Zhou, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bolei Zhou is a PhD student in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with Professor Antonio Torralba. His research interests include computer vision and machine learning. In particular, his current research focuses on developing deep learning models for scene understanding. He received his Bachelor degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and his Master degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Read More

Brandon Schlinker, University of Southern California

Brandon Schlinker is a third year PhD student in Computer Science at the Networked Systems Lab in the University of Southern California where he works with Professor Ethan Katz-Bassett. Brandon received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from San Jose State University in 2013. His current research focuses on improving the Internet’s performance, reliability, and security. Read More

Christian Kroer, Carnegie Mellon University

Christian is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is advised by Tuomas Sandholm. Christian’s research lies at the intersection of computer science, economics, and operations research. He is particularly focused on games, decision making, and markets. To achieve scalability in these settings, he often draws on techniques from artificial intelligence and mathematical programming. Read More

Ellie Pavlick, University of Pennsylvania

Ellie is a 4th year Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Chris Callison-Burch. She received her B.A. in economics from Johns Hopkins University and her B.M. in saxophone performance from the Peabody Conservatory in 2012. Ellie’s research aims at teaching computers to understand human language. Read More

Grant Ho, University of California Berkeley

Grant is a second-year Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, advised by Vern Paxson and David Wagner. His work explores how the security community can leverage empirical studies and data analysis to build secure systems and craft effective human/policy-oriented mitigations against attackers. Previously, he received his bachelors in computer science and graduated with honors from Stanford University. Read More

Jacob Andreas, University of California Berkeley

Jacob Andreas is a third-year PhD student at UC Berkeley, working with Dan

Klein. His research focuses on models for grounded language learning that link natural language to perception and action. He received a B.S. from Columbia in 2012 and an M.Phil. from Cambridge in 2013. ReadMore

Jonathan Mace, Brown University

Jonathan Mace is a PhD student in the Computer Science department at Brown University, advised by Rodrigo Fonseca. Jonathan received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Oxford University in 2009, and originally hails from New Zealand. He is broadly interested in distributed systems, networking, and operating systems. Read More

Judith Amores Fernandez, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Judith is a second year graduate student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab. Her main area of research focuses on Human Computer Interaction with the aim of making the user experience more seamless, natural and integrated in our physical lives. Her goal is to design and develop novel form factors that leverage the full range of sensory capabilities and control modalities of the user. Read More

Manasi Vartek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Manasi is a PhD student in the Database Group at MIT CSAIL advised by Sam Madden. She works on interactive systems to enable rapid data analysis using visualization and machine learning. She holds Bachelors degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and a Masters degree from MIT. Read More

Robert Nishihara, University of California Berkeley

Robert Nishihara is a 3rd-year PhD student at UC Berkeley working on machine learning and optimization with Michael Jordan. His research focuses on building tools and theory to effectively solve machine learning problems. Read More

Jimmy Lei Ba, University of Toronto

Jimmy Lei Ba is a third-year PhD student in the University of Toronto Machine Learning group. He obtained BASc, MASc degrees from the University of Toronto and has previously worked with Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Brendan Frey. His primary research interests are in the areas of deep neural networks. In particular, he has been developing attention-based machine learning models in the applications of computer vision. Also, He is broadly interested in questions related to computational cognitive science, numerical optimization and Bayesian statistics. Read More