Great news for all Computer Science Ph.D students in the US. Facebook, the most used social networking web service is offering fellowships to students pursuing PhD-level research in computer science that are doing research topics like data mining and social network.

The funding will come with a USD 30,000 stipend for nine months, and extra allowance of USD 5,000 each for travel to meetings and hardware.

As per Facebook’s blog:

As Facebook engineers, we are surrounded by engaging technical problems to solve. We’ve recently tackled efficient photo storage, distributed computation and crowdsourced translations, to name a few. While we’re working on inventive solutions on a daily basis, we can’t do it alone.

Today, we’re announcing the Facebook Fellowship Program to support Ph.D. students in the 2010-2011 school year who can help solve some of the biggest challenges facing the social web and Internet technology. We believe that the academic community plays a central role in addressing many of our most challenging research questions, and we created this fellowship to extend our involvement and collaboration with the academic world.

We are interested in a wide range of academic topics, including Internet economics, cloud computing, social computing, data mining, machine learning, and systems and information retrieval. Full-time Ph.D. students who are enrolled in U.S. universities and working on research in these topical areas qualify to apply for one of five fellowships, which will cover their tuition and fees and provide a $30,000 stipend in addition to conference travel and other benefits.

If you or someone you know fits the requirements above, we want to hear from you. To be sure our first fellows receive funding in time for the upcoming school year, we are working on the following tight deadlines:

• Feb. 15, 2010: Applications for fellowships must be submitted in full.
• March 29, 2010: Award recipients will be notified by email of their acceptance.

For more details on the fellowship and to apply, please visit the fellowship website.

We look forward to working together with leading Ph.D. researchers across the country to take on the big technological challenges facing our engineers and the social web. We are eagerly awaiting your applications for our first Facebook Fellowship Program.

Sounds great!. If you are interested,visit the fellowship website.