by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 9 January 2010 @ 02:37 UTC
From Jill Laster, Wired Campus
WASHINGTON, DC - Facebook is friending college researchers — and helping 
pay for their education — in the hope that academics will help the company improve its popular social network.
The company on Friday announced a new fellowship program to support five doctoral students, who will be asked to work with Facebook developers to solve current challenges in Internet technology and social media.
Recipients will receive tuition and fees for the 2010-11 academic year, along with money for travel, a $30,000 stipend, and other benefits.
“We believe that the academic community plays a central role in addressing many of our most challenging research questions, and we created this fellowship to extend our involvement and collaboration with the academic world,” said Greg Badros, Facebook’s director of engineering, in a statement.
Applicants must be full-time doctoral students enrolled in American universities and doing research in fields such as the economics of the Internet, cloud computing, social computing, data mining, machine learning, and systems and information retrieval. Fellowship applications must be submitted by February 15.
Facebook has only planned one year of fellowships so far but may continue the program in future years, said Matt Hicks, a spokesman for Facebook.
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