Facebook is proud to announce the 2017 Facebook Fellowship winners and finalists. “This year we received over 800 applications from promising PhD students,” said Rebekkah Hogan, Fellowship Program Manager. “The 2017 Fellows represent some of the most talented young researchers in computer science and engineering disciplines from universities across the globe.”

The Facebook Fellowship program, started in 2010, is designed to encourage and support promising doctoral students engaged in innovative and relevant research across computer science and engineering. Now, in its 6th year, the Facebook Fellowship program has supported over 50 top PhD candidates. The research topics from this year’s cohort range from power systems and micro grids to the intersection of computer vision, machine learning and cognitive science.

We congratulate this year’s talented group of Fellows, and are excited to engage deeper with them, learn more about their research, and support their continued studies.

2017 Facebook Fellows:

Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sangeetha is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, advised by Brighten Godfrey. Her primary research interest is in the area of computer networking. Currently, she is focusing on the design of a nearly speed-of-light Internet Service Provider.

Pavol Bielik, ETH Zurich
Pavol is a 3rd year PhD student at the ETH Zurich advised by Martin Vechev. His research is spanning the areas of programming languages, program analysis and machine learning. In particular, he focuses on creating new kinds of techniques and tools based on probabilistic learning from large codebases consisting of millions lines of code. Such tools can help us to solve important software tasks that are beyond the reach of existing techniques and yet are required daily in writing, understanding, porting or debugging programs.

Danqi Chen, Stanford University
Danqi Chen is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Stanford University. She works with Prof. Christopher Manning in the Natural Language Processing Group. Her research focuses on developing computer systems to better read and comprehend natural language documents, with an emphasis on deep learning models. Prior to Stanford, Danqi received a B.S. from Tsinghua University in 2012.

Edwin Fonkwe Fongang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Edwin Fonkwe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Diplôme d’Ingénieur de Conception (2009) from the Ecole Polytechnique Yaoundé (Cameroon) with a specialty in Electrical Engineering. He also holds an MSc (2013) in Electrical Power Engineering from the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, and a Master of Science (SM, 2015) from MIT. He is broadly interested in problems at the confluence of power electronics, controls, and power systems.

Rupert Freeman, Duke University
Rupert is a 4th year Ph.D. student at Duke University advised by Vincent Conitzer, having received his BSc from the University of Auckland. Rupert’s research lies at the intersection of computer science and economics, and he is particularly interested in problems that involve combining the preferences of multiple agents into a single agreeable decision.

Mark Jeffrey, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Mark Jeffrey is a fourth-year PhD student at MIT CSAIL, where he is advised by Daniel Sanchez. Mark received a BASc in Engineering Science and a MASc in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto. His research on parallel computer systems aims to scale hard to parallelize applications through new programming models and multicore architectures. His goal is to enable software engineers to write efficient and scalable parallel programs as easily as they write sequential programs today.

Anuj Kalia, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) 
Anuj is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. David Andersen. He received his B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT-Delhi. His research interest is in networked systems, with a focus on designing efficient software systems for high-speed networks.

Kirthevasan Kandasamy, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
Kirthevasan is a fourth year Ph.D. student working with Jeff Schneider and Barnabás Póczos in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He completed his B.Sc in Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. His primary research interests are in bandit optimisation and other sequential decision making problems but he also works on various topics in nonparametric statistics.

Elissa Redmiles, University of Maryland
Elissa Redmiles is a second-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on understanding how users make security decisions and developing security education interventions for at-risk users. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Elissa held Marketing Management and Software Engineering roles at IBM, was a 2015 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Fellow at the University of Chicago, and completed her B.S. in Computer Science, cum laude, at the University of Maryland.

Greg Steinbrecher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Greg is a Ph.D. candidate in the Quantum Photonics Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advised by Professor Dirk Englund. Greg received his S.B. in physics and electrical engineering from MIT in 2012 and his MEng in electrical engineering and computer science in 2013. His research interests lie at the intersection of quantum physics, communications, and systems engineering.

Shenlong Wang, University of Toronto
Shenlong Wang is a PhD student in Machine Learning Group at the University of Toronto, supervised by Raquel Urtasun. He obtained his BSc and MSc degrees from Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. Shenlong’s general research interest lies in computer vision and machine learning. He is particularly interested in 3D scene understanding and deep structural models.

Jiajun Wu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Jiajun Wu is a third-year Ph.D. student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advised by Professor Bill Freeman and Professor Josh Tenenbaum. His research interests lie on the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, and computational cognitive science. Before coming to MIT, he received his B.Eng. from Tsinghua University, China, advised by Professor Zhuowen Tu.

Diyi Yang, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
Diyi is a PhD student at Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Robert Kraut and Prof. Eduard Hovy. Her research interests lie in Social Computing and Natural Language Processing. She received her bachelor degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

2017 Facebook Fellowship finalists

• Laleh Aghababaie Beni, University of California, Irvine
• Lindsay Blackwell, University of Michigan School of Information
• Yi-Ching Chiu, University of Southern California
• Kevin Clark, Stanford University
• Alon Eden, Tel Aviv University
• Kira Goldner, University of Washington
• Arpit Gupta, Princeton University
• Yoon Kim, Harvard University
• Mathias Lecuyer, Columbia University NYC
• Frank Li, UC Berkeley
• Xiao Ma, Cornell University
• Ishan Misra, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
• Fabian Muhlbock, Cornell University
• Christopher Musco, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• Peshal Nayak, Rice University
• Ravi Netravali, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• Sungwoo Park, The University of Texas at Austin
• Jean Pouget-Abadie, Harvard University
• Vered Shwartz, Bar-Ilan University
• Khanh Truong Duy Nguyen, University of California, Irvine
• Xiaolong Wang, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
• Yu-Xiang Wang, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
• Hazal Yuksel, Cornell University
• Zhilin Yang, Carnegie Mellon University
• Yüpeng Zhang, University of Maryland
• Xu Zhao, University of Toronto

Complete information on the Facebook Fellowship program can be found here.

Information on the Facebook Emerging Scholar program can be found here.