Three School of Computer Science graduate students are among just 11 winners of 2014-2015 Facebook Graduate Fellowships. Four additional Carnegie Mellon University 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 stipend in addition to conference travel and other benefits. 

This year’s winners include:

• Alex Beutel, a third-year PhD student in the Computer Science Department (CSD). His current research focuses on understanding and exploiting group behavior through large-scale data mining and machine learning. He was a finalist for this fellowship last year.
• Haiyi Zhu, a PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute who earned a master’s degree in HCII in 2009, is interested in conducting large-scale data analysis and field experiments to understand the underlying principles in online collaboration projects.
• Nisarg Shah, a third-year PhD student in CSD. He is interested in the intersection of computer science and economics. His research synthesizes areas of microeconomic theory such as social choice, fair division, and game theory, with conceptual and technical approaches from the theory of computer science and artificial intelligence.

Finalists included Justin Meza, a PhD student in electrical and computer engineering (ECE); Mrinmaya Sachan, a masters student in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI); William Yang Wang, a PhD student in LTI; and Yoongu Kim, a PhD student in ECE.