Summary

Tell me about you with what you did and what you would do. By email or visit me during office hour.

My Objective

My objective is to help my students practice/refine their abilities as academic citizens, and produce interesting and quality research of course.

The following are some abilities that I believe are particularly valuable:

• Critical Thinking. An important component of research is the ability to make logical arguments and back those arguments with evidence. This will be your most important asset.
• Creativity. Our goal when doing research is to push the boundaries of what has been explored. This is also where academia grounds.
• Perseverance/Endurance. Unlike classes, where a few all nighters is sufficient to get by, research depends on making consistent, long term progress. There will be many difficult times (e.g., paper rejections, creative blocks, or just procrastination) that you will need the willingness to understand and overcome.
• Technical Background. Most research in Computer Science and Engineering nowadays materialize ideas through software systems and use those systems to gather evidence. Also, a good background knowledge on the engineering application saves precious research time from learning 101.

And I suppose sufficient research English.

To help me identify good-match applicants, it is helpful to concretely demonstrate your current abilities. The easiest way is to describe some past projects or researches in terms of why they were interesting, your approach, the challenges and solutions. Make it a blog-style article, not a lab or project report. I don’t expect applicants to be experts at everything, so it is important to be clear about your strengths and weaknesses. Finally, I will strive to work and generate ideas with you as a colleague. So describe some cool research ideas that you would find awesome to work on!

Recommendation

The best way to demonstrate that you can do good research is to have someone vouch for the good research you’ve done in the past. For this reason, the most effective letters are those from research supervisors that concretely describe your contributions to a specific project.

However, not every applicant has had the opportunity to perform research. In this case, letters that can describe your technical contributions, and the way you approach problems are most useful.

I will actively avoid reading letters that solely describe your performance in a course, which I do believe is an insignificant indicator.

Programming and Others

Programming is a large component of any computer science degree. It is important to demonstrate that you will be able to develop the systems necessary to conduct research experiments. Though less demanding than “pure” computer science topics, I am still looking for students that have experience building systems, including but not limited to machine learning models and agent-based simulation systems. Also (La)TeX if you think it is one.

If you currently have less programming experience, that is very fine if you demonstrate that you can and want to learn the necessary skillset. The best way is to show a sequence of projects or demonstrations that highlight your growth.

In either case, links to relevant and well documented github repositories will be extremely helpful.

Nonetheless, programming is not the one or the only one. Showing sufficient technical backgrounds that relate to what you want to do, other than programming, is still good enough to start a research career. Not-so-good coder can also conduct high-quality research, and good ones conduct faster, hypothetically statistically.