Two Ph.D. candidates in the School of Computer Science received Facebook Fellowships to support their ongoing research. Now in its 10th year, the fellowship program supports research on important computer science and engineering topics, such as computer vision, programming languages, computational social science and more.

Paul Pu Liang, a doctoral student in the Machine Learning Department, and Misha Khodak, a doctoral student in the Computer Science Department, will receive two years of paid tuition and fees and a $42,000 annual stipend to cover living and conference travel costs.

Liang earned a fellowship for spoken language processing and audio classification. His research seeks to create socially intelligent agents that can comprehend social cues, intents and affective states; engage in conversation; and understand social commonsense to better interact with humans.

Khodak's fellowship will support his research on modern metalearning and automation methods. He aims to democratize machine learning with a new, principled set of tools that enable the consistent, predictable and robust application of diverse data domains, expertise levels and computational resources.

About 2,100 people applied for the fellowship from more than 100 universities worldwide. Facebook selected 26 fellows this year from 19 universities.

Xinshuo Weng in the Robotics Institute, Jenna Wise in the Institute for Software Research and Karan Ahuja in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute were finalists for fellowships.