Three School of Computer Science graduate students have been named to the 2017 class of Facebook fellows.

Founded in 2010, the Facebook Fellowship program is designed to help foster ties with the academic community, encourage and support promising Ph.D. students engaged in research across computer science and engineering, and provide those students with opportunities to work with Facebook on problems relevant to their research. Since its inception, the program has supported more than 50 Ph.D. candidates, whose research covers topics that range from from power systems and microgrids to the intersection of computer vision, machine learning and cognitive science.

SCS Ph.D. students Anuj Kalia, Kirthevasan Kandasamy and Diyi Yang are among this year's winners.

Kalia is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department and an advisee of Associate Professor David Anderson. He received his B.Tech in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology-Dehli, and his research interests include networked systems, with a focus on designing efficient software systems for high-speed networks.

A fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department, Kandasamy works with Research Professor of Robotics Jeff Schneider and Assistant Professor of Machine Learning Barnabás Póczos on bandit optimization and other sequential decision-making problems. He's also interested in various topics in nonparametric statistics. Kandasamy completed his B.Sc. in electronic and telecommunication engineering at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka.

Yang, a Ph.D. student in the Language Technologies Institute, is an advisee of Herbert A. Simon Professor of Human-Computer Interaction Robert Kraut and Research Professor Eduard Hovy. Her interests include social computing and natural language processing, and her research aims to draw insights and develop algorithms for deeper language understanding. Yang received her B.Sc. in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai.

Facebook fellows receive full payment for two years of tuition and fees, a stipend of $37,000 each year and up to $5,000 in conference travel support. More than 800 students applied for this year's program, and 13 fellows were selected.

"The 2017 fellows represent some of the most talented young researchers in computer science and engineering disciplines from universities across the globe," the company said.

Read more about about the 2017 fellows and the Facebook Fellowship program on Facebook Research.