PhD positions with full fellowship at University of Texas Arlington

Dr. Kenny Q. Zhu from UT Arlington (UTA) is inviting applications for fully-funded PhD positions in computer science program with Spring or Fall 2024 admissions.

About UTA: With an enrollment of approximately 46,000 students, UTA is the largest institution in North Texas and the second-largest in the UT System. As a result of its combination of rigorous academics and innovative research, UTA is designated as a Carnegie R-1 “Very High Research Activity” institution and as a Texas Tier One institution. According to the latest USNews Graduate School ranking, the College of Engineering graduate program at UTA is ranked 69th, while its computer science program is ranked 89th nationally.

About CSE: The computer science program at the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department is ranked  #60 in the nation by csrankings.org (as of September 2023, based on average 2018-23 publication counts), and several areas are ranked in the top 60, including computer security (#48), software engineering (52), operating systems (#18), high-performance computing (#16), mobile computing (#32), databases (#31), NLP (#58). In the last few years students and faculty in the department have received distinguished paper awards from prestigious conferences, including PLDI, ASE, SIGMETRICS, MIDDLEWARE, CIDR, CIKM, ECML PKDD, ICAC, ICDE, ICDM, ISSRE, ISSTA, IUI, PSIVT, SIGMOD, SIGCHI, and VLDB.

About the advisor: Kenny Q. Zhu is a full professor of computer science at University of Texas at Arlington. He graduated with B.Eng (Hons) in Electrical Engineering in 1999 and PhD in Computer Science in 2005 from National University of Singapore. He was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer from 2007 to 2009 at Princeton University. Prior to that, he was a software design engineer at Microsoft, Redmond, WA. From Feb 2010 to Aug 2010, he was a visiting professor at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing. From 2010 to 2023, he was first an associate professor and then a full professor and deputy chair at Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Kenny's main research interests are natural language processing, knowledge engineering, and programming languages. His work has been focused on enabling machines to understand natural languages and further generate these languages. This is one of the most challenging tasks in artificial intelligence. His recent focus has been making NLP models smaller, more accessible and interpretable, and developing interdisciplinary NLP techniques, such as animal language processing and NLP for mental health. He has published extensively and served as senior committee members in top NLP and AAAI venues such as ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI, and IJCAI. His research has been supported by NSF China, MOE China, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Morgan Stanley, and AstraZeneca. Kenny is the winner of the 2013 Google Faculty Research Award and 2014 DASFAA Best Paper Award.

Expected Qualifications from the Applicants:
1) A bachelor degree in computer science or related subjects; Masters degree in CS is optional;
2) Strong interest and curiosity in NLP/AI research;
3) Hardworking and good committment;
4) Strong academic integrity;
5) Good health.

To apply, please email me at kenny.zhu[at]uta[dot]edu with your CV, TOEFL score report, and transcripts from your undergraduate and graduate studies (if applicable). Note for 2024 admission, UTA has waived the requirement of GRE scores, but a minimum TOEFL score of 90 and an speaking score of 23 is required.