School of Computer Science students Jessica Colnago and Xiaolong Wang are among 23 Ph.D. students named Facebook Fellows and Emerging Scholar award winners for 2018. Three additional SCS students were finalists.

The Facebook Fellowship program, now in its seventh year, encourages and supports promising doctoral students engaged in innovative research across computer science and engineering that is relevant to Facebook. The Emerging Scholars program, launched last year, recognizes talented first- or second-year Ph.D. students from groups that are under-represented in the technology sector. More than 800 Ph.D. students around the world applied to the programs this year.

Colnago, recognized as an Emerging Scholar, is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Institute for Software Research's Societal Computing program, and a member of both the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory and the Privacy Economics Experiments Lab. Her research includes identifying and understanding people's most salient privacy concerns and behaviors surrounding new technologies, and identifying users' preferred approach to privacy in different data-sharing contexts, such as social networking sites (SNSs) and the internet of things (IoT).

Wang, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute, was awarded a Facebook Fellowship. His research interests include computer vision and machine learning. He studies how to exploit redundancy in visual data to learn visual representations, and has proposed ways to automatically extract supervisory signals from depth images and video data where human labels are hard to find. He also explores the modeling of long-range pairwise relationships between redundant patterns in neural networks to improve general video-classification and image-recognition tasks.

Doctoral students Gabriele Farina of the Computer Science Department, and Hsiao-Yu Tung and Zhiting Hu, both of the Machine Learning Department, were fellowship finalists.