The  Facebook team shows commitment to academic research through a fellowship program for doctoral students.  This may turn into a particularly interesting project if  in addition to funding, the fellows also get access to the vast amount of data residing on the company’s servers.

Facebook Fellowship Program

Every day Facebook confronts the most complex technical problems and we believe that close relationships with the academy will enable us to address many of these problems at a fundamental level and solve them. As part of our ongoing commitment to academic relations, we are pleased to announce the creation of the Facebook Fellowship program to support graduate students in the 2010-2011 school year.

We are interested in a wide range of academic topics, including the following topical areas:

* Internet Economics: auction theory and algorithmic game theory relevant to online advertising auctions.
* Cloud Computing: storage, databases, and optimization for computing in a massively distributed environment.
* Social Computing: models, algorithms and systems around social networks, social media, social search and collaborative environments.
* Data Mining and Machine Learning: learning algorithms, feature generation, and evaluation methods to produce effective online and offline models of behavioral signals.
* Systems: hardware, operating system, runtime, and language support for fast, scalable, efficient data centers.
* Information Retrieval: search algorithms, information extraction, question answering, cross-lingual retrieval and multimedia retrieval

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