A few weeks ago, 10 women were named recipients of the inaugural Microsoft Research Graduate Women's Scholarships. Among the 10 was Dafna Shahaf, whom I got to meet a little while ago.

Shahaf, an engaging second-year Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University who got her master's degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was pleasantly surprised by the scholarship.

"Pretty much about the time you forget about the whole application process," she said, "you get e-mail saying, 'Hey, congratulations!' And then you start getting a whole flood of e-mail saying you were invited to TechFest, and you're invited to that, and you should come and have your picture taken. I said, 'Ooh, sweet!' "

Shahaf is focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) and theory at Carnegie Mellon.

"AI was always the holy grail," she said. "Maybe I read too much science fiction as a kid."

One of her projects has involved the automation of fact-checking results from sites such as FactCheck.org,

"If there's a fact and people are talking about it, you want to see if it's true," Shahaf said. "You want to combine sources over the Web and assign importance. If it's on the government side, you might want to assign more importance. If it's some blogger ... No offense!" 

The scholarship includes a number of provisions. Recipients receive a cash award of $15,000 for the 2009 academic year. They also are invited to attend an award ceremony at Microsoft Research Redmond, with travel expenses picked up by Microsoft Research. Oh, and one more thing:

"There's another bonus," Shahaf said, "letting me go to pretty much any conference I like, which is neat, because I don't have to convince my advisers. This is something I'm definitely going to take advantage of."

How so, however, remains to be seen.

"It depends if my paper gets accepted in this one conference or not," Shahaf said. "Otherwise, I'm going anyway."

Other recipients of the inaugural Microsoft Research Graduate Women's Scholarships:

• Xide Lin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• Laura Grupp, University of California, San Diego.
• America Holloway, University of California, Irvine.
• Jing-Jing Liu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Jin Joo Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology.
• Michaela Goetz, Cornell University.
• Tamara Denning, University of Washington.
• Meromit Singer, University of California, Berkeley.
• Katrina Panovich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.