Thank you for your interest in joining our group. I am always looking for passionate, self-motivated students to join our group. Strong candidates may also:

• Clearly articulate and discuss the motivations behind your work, and teach us about what you've learned.
• Skills to teach others about your findings and methodologies. Enjoyment and proficiency in writing up and communicating research results, including null results, through papers, reports, and presentations.
• Strong ability to work effectively within a team, making collaborative, data-driven research decisions.
• Experience and ease in working with researchers from different fields and disciplines. We are an interdisciplinary team!
• Believe that a great way to discover a new, big-picture vision is to first get involved in the details.
• Prior experience in conducting quantitative research in another scientific field, providing a strong foundation for analytical thinking and problem-solving in AI/ML.
• Personal Qualities: Strong interest and passion for AI/ML research. Ability to handle setbacks and persist through challenging research problems. Strong analytical and critical thinking skills to evaluate and improve research work.

If you like to know what kinds of research we are doing, please check out our group page, recent publication, or research statement. Note that I prefer firstly working with students through my classes, directed studies, summer internships, or short-term projects, then start formal advising relationships later on.

NOTE: Students who are already advising by other faculty are not eligible for my advising or/and collaboration. Please ask your advisor(s) to contact me if you or/and your advisor(s) are interested in collaborating.

Current UMN students:

Please fill out this form. For Master and undergrad students, the minimum time commitment is 15 hours per week at least for 3 months. Internship review will be on a rolling basis at the end of each semester. You will receive an email from DK and there will be an interview process if you pass the first round. The typical acceptance rate for internships is less than 15%, so please describe in detail your interests, strengths, weaknesses, and previous work in AI and its applications.

Prospective postdocs, faculty, and visiting graduate students:

Please email me directly with your CV and a short description of your research interest.

Prospective graduate students outside UMN:

My apologies for not being able to reply back to your emails. Due to the high volume of email inquiries, I will have a very limited opportunity to reply to your email. Generally, graduate applications will be reviewed and processed by the admissions committee, in which I am not involved. Thus, please directly apply to the graduate programs in UMN CSE and list me as a potential advisor in your application.

Students who need my recommendation letters:

Because of the limited bandwidth, I can only write letters to those who have conducted research with me, such as directed studies, research internships, thesis committees, etc. If you take my NLP classes, I can write letters only if your class project has a research novelty or can be extended to submit it to a conference/workshop. Let me know about your application at least THREE WEEKS before the deadline. Otherwise, I may not be able to guarantee that my letters will be written on time.

Questions about our group's work:

Send us an email anytime!