Important Note about Contact Email
For all inquiries about potential research positions in my group, please send an email to dl.group.apply at gmail dot com.
Prospective graduate students
I am currently recruiting strong and motivated students. Please send an email if you are a graduate student at University of Michigan and have interest in getting involved with research. Specifically, I am looking for students with the following qualifications:
- highly motivated and always wanting to do better
- highly creative
- have strong technical abilities in mathematics and developing algorithms
- good at programming and running systematic experiments
- good communicator both in speaking and writing
- have strong interests and intuitions about science in general
Since I work on machine learning, having research experience in machine learning (especially, having publications in top conferences) is a definite plus. In general, incoming PhD students in my group have one or more publications at top-tier ML (or related) conferences, such as ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, etc.
Otherwise, I would expect strong mathematical and analytical background or substantial research experience in pattern recognition, optimization, artificial intelligence, and data mining.
I prefer students having strong math and machine learning background *before* joining my group. So, if you are interested in my group, I strongly recommend you to take as many of the following (graduate-level) courses as possible before applying:
- Probabilistic Graphical Models
- Machine Learning
- Artificial Intelligence
- Computer Vision
- Linear and nonlinear optimization
- Convex optimization
- Real Analysis
- Functional Analysis
- Stochastic Process
- Advanced Algorithms (advanced discrete optimization and approximation algorithms)
- Theory of Probability
If you are interested, please apply to CSE division and indicate my name among the faculty of interest.
*Advice for international students: Although I strongly emphasize research experience, international students are expected to speak and write English well beyond a certain threshold to satisfy the Ph.D. admission criteria. Beyond admission, good communication skill is extremely important for your academic and professional success; so please do not neglect it.
Undergraduate research
I also work closely with undergraduate students in various research projects. I am looking for undergraduate students who have (1) strong motivation, (2) good mathematical skills (e.g., linear algebra and probability), and (3) good programming skills (e.g., experience in object oriented programming, MATLAB, or python).
If you are an undergraduate student at University of Michigan and have interest in getting involved with research, please email me. In particular, I strongly encourage you to apply to Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) or Summer Undergraduate Research in Engineering (SURE). Please note that students who intend to perform long-term research (at least a year or more) will be given preference in the selection process.
As coursework, I would require or recommend the following courses:
- Required (try to finish these courses as early as possible, e.g., by 1st or 2nd year):
- MATH 115, MATH 116, MATH 215
- Engr 100, Engr 101
- EECS 203, 280, 281
- Strongly Recommended:
- MATH 217 (Linear Algebra) or MATH 417 (Matrix Algebra)
- MATH 425 (Introduction to Probability) or EECS 401 (Probabilistic Methods in Engineering)
- EECS 445/545 (Machine Learning)
- EECS 492 (Intro to Artificial Intelligence)
- EECS 442/542 (Computer Vision)
- EECS 595 (Natural Language Processing)
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