My group is conducting research at an international level.

I have high standards.

You and your work need to be competitive with graduate students in top universities in the US and Europe (think Stanford, MIT, CMU).

This is hard work.

Except for very rare circumstances, you cannot maintain an "outside" hi-tech job while conducting good research.

You will need to read many research papers.

You will need to write many research papers.

There is no guarantee you will finish a thesis "on time".

You are expected to be independent and self motivated.

I will push you to do good work, and provide the needed conditions for it.

But I won't pressure you with deadlines etc.

If you choose to slack for a week or two or a year, it is up to you.

I work in an applied field.

You need to know how to program and like to program. You will program. Quite a lot.

"I know Java" won't cut it. You will need to learn more.

You will need to be proficient in a Linux environment.

You will need to be able to "get things to work".

My research interests are in applied machine learning (ML), with the main application area being natural language processing (NLP).

If you want to work with me, you need to take at least 89-680, the Introduction to Natural Language Processing course, or otherwise convince me why you don't need to.

You need to be curious about at least two of:
- human language;
- getting insights from data;
- statistical learning.
Preferably all three.

More specific recent interests include:

Deep learning methods, in particular recurrent neural networks -- why they work and how to use them well.

Predicting complex linguistic structure.

Syntax.

Learning with limited amounts of supervision and large amount of un-annotated data.

Methods that work well across domains.

Computational Creativity.

I will also be happy to discuss your own research interests, after you take the Intro to NLP course.

I am open to working on interesting ML problems outside of NLP. But you will have to convince me they are interesting.