Students interested in joining our research group can contact me via email to inquire about the availability of positions for MS or PhD students. Please note that I only work with students pursuing a thesis. In particular, MCS students or students seeking independent research positions post-graduation are typically not considered for our group.
Students Enrolled at NC State
Students who have already joined the department are encouraged to contact me if their research interests align with our group's research areas:
- visualization,
- visual analytics,
- computer graphics,
- UI/UX,
- text analytics, and
- machine learning.
Students Applying to NC State
If you are considering entering the Computer Science graduate program at NC State, the normal path for choosing a supervisor is as follows.
- Apply to the NCSU Computer Science Department.
- Receive an offer of admission.
- Accept the offer of admission and join our department.
- At that point, you are encouraged to contact me if your research interests align with our group's research.
Research Assistantships
Research assistantships (RAs) are assigned on an as-available basis, in the order in which students joined our group. Please note that no student will receive funding in their first semester. The first semester is considered a “getting to know you” semester, during which students typically take an independent research course to explore areas of interest. At the end of the independent study, I will meet with students to discuss whether a formal supervision role is appropriate.
Also note, RAs are never provided to students who are not pursuing a thesis in my group.
Use of AI
Recently, the use of artificial intelligence has become prevalent in student writing and coding. Because of this, I want to define my expectations regarding graduate students' use of AI in their work.
Critically, the novel ideas and contributions a student makes to their area of research must be entirely their own. No use of AI is appropriate to define or pursue the basic research or basic research results that a student intends to include in their thesis.
An important point to consider is that an MS or PhD thesis is your original contribution to your research area. AI is the combination or summarization of existing work. Given this, a student should want to protect their contribution by keeping it entirely separate from an AI system.
Writing: The use of AI for grammar and spelling, light copy-editing, or suggestions for how to better phrase sentences or other small sections of text is appropriate. A practical example is a program like Grammarly. Use of AI that would not be appropriate includes (but is not necessarily limited to) prompt engineering large blocks of text, providing an incomplete draft to an LLM and asking it to complete the writing, or asking an LLM to provide a background summary for a student's research area without reading and understanding the referenced papers.
When you write, you want to ensure clarity and intent. Specifically, your writing should be clear to readers, even those who are not necessarily experts in your area. You also want a reader to understand the important points you are making. AI often complicates or completely misunderstands issues you want to describe in an unambiguous manner. Because of this, if you use AI to help with your writing, you need to carefully check the results to confirm that what you want is what you were provided.
Coding: The use of AI for coding is similar to writing. Collaboration with an AI assistant like Copilot is appropriate for small snippets of boilerplate code, references to a library's API, or understanding calling semantics across different languages (e.g. Python's index() versus JavaScript's indexOf() functions). Prompt engineering large sections of code, asking an assistant to write programs that are specific to a student's thesis research, or “vibe coding” in general is not appropriate.
Different faculty members will have different levels of comfort regarding students' use of AI. My own guidelines are not meant to be ethical boundaries or definitions of right and wrong. These are simply the expectations I apply to my students, or to any students where I serve as an advisor or committee member.