Justin Cranshaw, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Institute for Software Research's Computation, Organizations and Society program, and Julian Shun, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department (CSD), are among a dozen Facebook Graduate Fellowship winners for 2013-2014. Four CMU students were finalists.

The fellowships support emerging research leaders who demonstrate potential to advance Facebook's mission of making the world more open and connected. Fellowships cover tuition and fees and provide a $30,000 stipend in addition to conference travel and other benefits.

Cranshaw's research contributes to a number of fields, including ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, and computational social science. He wants to build systems that can make sense of the complex and ever changing landscape of big cities. He believes that teaching computers to understand and interpret the urban environment just as well as humans will unleash a whole new wave of social and mobile applications that improve the way we live, work, and play in cities.

Algorithms are the focus of Shun's research. He is doing work in parallel algorithms for shared memory multicore machines. Because of the need to quickly process large data, he is particularly interested in developing large-scale parallel algorithms. Additionally, Shun is interested in studying techniques that simplify shared memory programming.

Finalists from CMU were Alex Beutel in CSD, Rebecca Balebako of Engineering and Public Policy, Wang Ling of the Language Technologies Institute and Justin Meza of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.