Meta has accepted a new friend request from the University of Washington.
The tech giant is bolstering its relationship with the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering to form the Meta AI Mentorship Program, allowing PhD students from that school to collaborate with company researchers.
The program is designed to advance graduate student research under the guidance of both a UW faculty advisor and researchers in Meta’s Seattle office by collaborating on projects of mutual interest, according to a UW announcement on Wednesday.
Meta, the company once known as Facebook, employs more than 7,000 people in the Seattle region.
The UW said students and Meta researchers might engage on such things as representation learning, natural language generation, machine translation, question answering, semantic parsing and large-scale optimization.
Participants in inaugural cohort will number up to five students and the program is currently open to Allen School PhD students in their second year or later. Students will be encouraged to publish the results of their work with their advisors and Meta mentors — and to incorporate that work into their dissertation research.
“Our goal is to encourage students to think big and to make progress on important research questions, so we intentionally designed the mentorship program with open research in mind,” said Luke Zettlemoyer, a professor in the Allen School’s Natural Language Processing group and a research director at Meta AI. “We want to ensure that students not only have a great experience, but also come away with results they can build off of to advance their careers.”
The Allen School and Meta have had a long relationship, which includes Meta researchers who are affiliate professors in the Allen School, Allen School professors engaged with Meta, student fellowships and internships, and Meta’s support for the UW Reality Lab focused on augmented and virtual reality.
And Meta is not alone in tapping into UW tech talent or supporting the university. Amazon and the UW announced in February, for instance, that they would collaborate on a new “Science Hub” funded with an initial $1.9 million investment from the company. And Microsoft is a big backer of a number of buildings and programs at the university.
