I am very selective about who I work with. If you are a student looking to work with me or join my lab/center, please read this carefully.
If you are an undergraduate or a masters student, you need to have very strong technical skills and motivation for doing research. Typically there is a 10 hours/week commitment for a project, so if this is not something you can do, please look elsewhere. Most times, if you are in my lab/center, you will be working with a PhD student. In fact, it would be almost required for most applicants to identify a specific PhD student/postdoc and a project to work on before I agree to take them in.
Note that I am unable to answer most inquiries, especially those that seem to come to me without having done their homework on me, my labs/centers, and research projects. If you are really interested in working with me, do your due diligent -- look up my research projects, publications, talks, etc. first. You may also contact PhD students to see if they are looking for students to join their projects. This is often the best way to join my lab/center.
I don't take remote interns or short-term visitors.
The following points are for the PhD students/applicants.
- I accept and advise students through iSchool and CSE at UW. There are no real differences in terms of what you would do with me. But there are big differences in how admission process for both these units work. Please do your research and learn about what those differences are (e.g., admission criteria, credit and general exam requirements).
- Our admission process is VERY competitive, so I recommend you spend some time learning about what makes a successful application. Your research statement and letters of recommendation are quite important. You may want to consult with some of the current PhD students here to see how to construct a strong application.
- Your research statement, past research experience, and your motivation for doing PhD matter a lot. I also want to see your fit with my research and at UW. Most of my work is VERY technical, so I expect my students to have strong technical skills. That includes a good command on programming environments (Python, Github), statistics and machine learning (including neural networks and deep learning), as well as ability to read and understand current technical papers on ML/AI. Currently I'm deeply involved in research related to generative AI, specifically agentic AI. Many of our projects involve search and recommender systems, but there are other applications and domains as well (e.g., multimodal and conversational systems). We are focusing on issues of robustness, auditing, bias, and fairness with AI, as well as using LLMs responsibly in various applications.
- I expect my PhD students to write, and write regularly. You will be expected to write technical reports even before your experiments are done. You will be asked to write and present regularly during a quarter and long before a paper deadline. Each of my PhD students submits at least 2 full papers a year to major conferences/journals.
- PhD is a long and arduous (but rewarding!) journey. A lot could happen and change, so don't expect to carry out some preconceived plan. You also have to be ready to tackle new challenges and learn new things that you had never done before or planned on doing.
- If this is still promising and you want to work with me, you can list me as a potential advisor, but note that you also need a couple more faculty here excited about your research potential.