About working with me.
If you haven't already, have look at the 'research' section of my website to learn more about my work. While I am open to a variety of applicants, I am particularly interested in recruiting students in the following areas:
- developing and evaluating creative language models, for instance by co-designing with creative communities or designing new metrics for evaluation;
- studying the impact of language models on ownership and learning, particularly in creative or educational contexts;
- investigating new methods of exposing models to writers, such as using influence functions to show how outputs relate to training data.
My work uses a variety of methodologies, including designing novel technical methods (e.g. new decoding methods for language models), investigating psychological effects (e.g. how different AI interventions correlate with feelings of ownership), and doing qualitative investigations of technology impacts (e.g. how writers think about the use of their writing as training data).
Finally, I am interested in recruiting students who come from marginalized communities or unorthodox backgrounds. I myself did my undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering, coming to Computer Science after working as a data scientist in start-ups for four years.
About working at the University of Sydney (USyd).
There is official information about the Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering program here. At Australian universities, you first contact individual faculty (as opposed to a centralized process used in US universities) and can do so at any time.
PhDs typically take 3-4 years, with a minimal courseload. No teaching is required, but you will have opportunities to teach if you desire. I encourage industry internships if interested.
All students are funded to do just research for the length of their PhD.
Jonathan Kummerfeld (NLP faculty at USyd) has a nice comparison of USyd to various international universities here, in terms of rankings.
Sydney is a beautiful cosmopolitan harbour city that supports, if I may say so, an excellent lifestyle.
After you fill out this form, if I feel we may be a good match, I will contact you to set up an informal 30 minute virtual meeting and we'll go from there.