Two Carnegie Mellon PhD students, Hyeontaek Lim of the Computer Science Department, and Michelle Mazurek of Electrical and Computer Engineering, are among 12 students chosen as Facebook Fellows for 2012-13.

Facebook launched the fellowship program in 2010 to foster ties with the academic community and support the research of promising computer science Ph.D. students.

Lim will focus on developing techniques to improve the resource efficiency of distributed systems. He hopes to deliver more affordable data-intensive computing, facilitating future innovations for large-scale Internet services.

Mazurek is researching ways to let users share their content accurately and quickly, secure in the knowledge that only the right people will see it. Rather than setting specific permissions for each piece of content, her system will let users easily set comprehensive, human-understandable rules for controlling access to certain types of data. By combining provable security and user-focused design, she hopes to help users avoid wading through complicated and confusing privacy settings while still maintaining control over who sees their content.

Each Fellow receives full payment for their 2012-2013 tuition, a $30,000 stipend to cover study expenses, $5,000 for conference travel, and $2,500 for a personal computer. All Fellows will visit Facebook later this year to meet with engineers working on problems relevant to their research.

Finalists for this year's fellowship included Bin Fan and Jeehyung Lee of the Computer Science Department, Jason Wiese, Jeffrey Rzeszotarski, and Jennifer Marlow of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Low Yucheng of the Machine Learning Department.