Joining UCSC ERIC Lab

Thank you for your interest in joining the UCSC Embodied, Responsible Interaction and Communication (ERIC) Lab! There is at least one opening PhD position in my lab each year. I have compiled some freqently asked questions for students who are interested in working with me. Please read the following information before contacting me. Due to time constraints, I might not be able to reply to your email.

Instructions of contacting me for prospective students and visitors

Prospective PhD students who are not currently at UCSC: please read the official graduate student admission policy of the UCSC CSE Department for general departmental requirements (GRE is no longer required). When you apply, you may list me as a potential advisor in your application and personal statement. Once you have done so, you may drop me a line. If you email me, please describe your motivations (especially why you think we’d be a good match), and include your CV, transcripts, and representative publication (if any).
Current UCSC students: please email me directly with your CV and transcript. For MS students and undergraduates, the minimum time commitment is 20 hours per week for six months.
Prospective visiting students: there are openings in my lab for interns and visiting scholars. I typically do not accept unsolicited applications for visiting students, interns, or scholars. The only exception is that you can demonstrate your expertise in my research area (typically via strong publications) and have sufficient funding to support yourself.

My research interests

My research interests include Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning, with an emphasis on building embodied AI agents that can communicate with humans using natural language to perform real-world tasks. You may want to read my research statement to get a better idea (though it might be slightly dated).

Natural Language Processing (natural language grounding, knowledge reasoning, fairness and bias, multilingualism)
Computer Vision (vision and language, visual navigation and robotics, activity understanding in videos)
Machine Learning (multimodal machine learning, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, efficiency, causality)

Why UCSC

UC Santa Cruz is one of America's Public Ivy universities and a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU). Times Higher Education rated UC Santa Cruz 3rd in the world for research influence (with a citation score of 99.9), tied with Stanford University. UCSC PhD graduates who chose to join academia have taken tenure-track positions at top schools such as UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, MIT, JHU, UNC, WUSTL. UCSC CS is ranked among top 30 (next to Harvard, JHU, UChicago etc.) on csrankings.org in 2020-2021, an objective CS rankings based on top conference publications. Moreover, UCSC CS is rising very rapidly, for instance, four new faculty (including me) are joining UCSC CSE in this upcoming academic year. The department has many leading researchers in the broad area of AI, data science, and systems: Lise Getoor, Marilyn Walker, Manfred Warmuth, Darral Long, Yi Zhang, James Davis, Roberto Manduchi, Luca de Alfaro, Chen Qian, Yang Liu, Peter Alvaro, Cihang Xie, Jeffrey Flanigan ... just to name a few.
Location wise, UCSC's proximity to Silicon Valley (around 30-min driving) and satellite campus there, make industrial collaborations, startups, exchange of ideas, and internships very easy. UCSC has one of the most beautiful and unique campuses in the world (YouTube video | bilibili video) and perfect weather year-round. Santa Cruz is also a wonderful place for outdoor activities such as hiking, surfing, diving, kayaking, and golfing.

What I expect from you

I have four primary requirements for my PhD students. First of all, self-motivated: students must be curious about research and self-motivated to overcome obstacles when researching new findings. Second, students need to be mathematically mature (i.e., proficient and comfortable with probability theory, statistics, linear algebra, optimization, and calculus). One way to test yourself is to carefully go through some of the best ML papers published at recent ICML/NIPS/AAAI/IJCAI conferences, and see if you can fully understand the main equations in those papers. Third, I require my students to be proficient in programming: they should have expertise in one or more programming languages such as Python, C, C++, Java. The ability of prototyping ideas quickly is often a big plus. Last and probably the most important: hard-working and reliable. No matter how smart you are and what fields you are in, if you don't spend enough time on your work, there is no way you can be an expert. An observation from the most successful PhD students is that they are all reliable and work extremely hard. In summary, if you are a hard-working, reliable person who is passionate about advancing AI and solid in Math and programming, please consider applying to UCSC.

What I can offer to you

Full financial support including complete tuition waiver, monthly stipend, health insurance, and summer salary.
World-class research environment comprising innovative research ideas for top-tier conferences (e.g., ACL/EMNLP/NAACL, CVPR/ICCV/ECCV, and NeurIPS/AAAI/ICLR), and large-scale computational resources.
First-hand research guidance from me during weekly 1-1 meetings, as well as a collabrative and friendly group environment where periodical social events will be organized to unit group members together.
Potential internship opportunities in top research labs in the industry including (but not limited to) Google AI, Microsoft Research, Facebook AI Research, Adobe Research, Amazon, Nvidia etc. My personal contact (see my previous employment) and UCSC's proximity to Silicon Valley make the industrial collaboration very easy.