Two Cornell Computing and Information Science doctoral students are among 10 elite students selected for the 2018-19 Microsoft Ph.D. Fellowship Program. The program provides 100 percent of tuition and fees for two consecutive academic years and an annual stipend of $32,000. Since its inception, the program has supported 22 fellows, many of whom have gone on to perform pioneering research in the technology industry.

“These are incredibly talented students, the top students from across North America,” said Bill Dolan, research manager at Microsoft’s Research Lab.

Manish Raghavan, in the field of computer science, seeks to understand and develop techniques to mitigate the effects of machine learning algorithms, which have raised concerns about potential adverse impacts on disadvantaged populations. This involves analyzing mechanisms that address particular societal biases as well as identifying fundamental trade-offs that exist between desirable properties of algorithmic systems.

Justine Zhang, in the field of information science, aims to develop models of conversations that explicitly encode the complex interactional dynamics they entail and are applicable to the diversity and scale of large online social systems.