Facebook launches fellowships to lure top graduate students

Facebook is using a tried-and-true Silicon Valley tactic to lure top engineering talent from graduate schools around the country. The social network just launched a fellowship program offering a $30,000 stipend, $5,000 for travel and conference attendance, another $5,000 for a personal computer and an opportunity for a paid summer internship.
The tradition of offering to pay for graduate school in order to recruit the best technical talent goes back more than 50 years in Silicon Valley. Google also offers its own graduate fellowships too. Applicants have to be full-time Ph.D students in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, system architecture or a related area. They have to be nominated by a faculty member. The application itself is pretty standard: CV, a research summary, two letters of recommendation and the faculty sponsor. It’s due on February 15.
They’re interested in the following 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