Later today, Facebook will be announcing the launch of a new Fellowship program, inviting Ph.D. engineering students across the United States who are working on fields related to social computing and other Internet technologies to apply for one of five valuable fellowships. The company has launched a new site for the program here.

Students chosen to receive a fellowship will have their tuition and fees paid for the entire academic year, a $30,000 stipend, $5,000 to spend towards a computer, and another $5,000 to pay for travel and conference fees. They’ll also have the chance to apply to a paid internship at Facebook for the following summer.

Here are some of the areas Facebook says it is interested in:

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

Applications are due February 15, 2010, and the winners will be announced on March 29. You can find more details on eligibility at the site’s homepage.