Thanks for your interest in working with us! Generally, every year, I hope to recruit a few PhD students (0-2), a few masters students (0-2), a few full-time research assistants. While we are flexible when it comes to working from home, we do not recruit fully-remote members. There are no internships available.
I generally get a lot of emails and spend a significant amount of time reading and responding to them—this is time I wish I would have spent working with my students, or thinking about research problems. The kind of student emails that I reply most to (1) follow guidelines written below; and (2) talk specifically about relevant research maturely (saying I found your recent paper “X” intriguing does not qualify).
Please see the following FAQs:
We broadly work in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). These areas already impact our lives—from answering questions we ask, curating content we read online, auto-completing words we are likely to type, to translating text from languages we don’t understand. The lab aims to ensure that such technologies are inclusive, safe and are adopted responsibly. Specifically, we plan to initiate projects related to inclusive model evaluation, model control (e.g., editing, de-biasing trained models) and also on validating data sources (in response to biased or harmful behavior). Additionally, we hope to contribute towards important NLP applications (e.g., content moderation, assisted writing), and engage in understanding their broader societal and ethical implications. From the outset, the lab is envisioned to be diverse, transparent, friendly and highly collaborative.
PhD & M.Tech (by research) programs: You’d have to formally be accepted at IISc first. If you feel you are a good fit, I’d encourage you to apply to these programs, specifying the Department of Computational Data Sciences (CDS) in your application. The institute-wide application deadline for this year is March 22, 2024 (11:59 PM IST). More details about the admissions process are here. Some frequently asked questions about admissions are answered here. Note that some students from centrally funded institutes—including IITs, NITs—don’t need to write national tests (e.g., GATE) to apply for the PhD program. This is a step forward towards simplifying admissions. I would encourage interested students to reach out (via email) ahead of the admission cycle, so that we can better understand each other’s interests and research styles.
Research Assistants (RAs)/Pre-docs: directly reach out with the following information.
Interns: There are no available internship positions.
Please address me by my first name, no titles needed. In your email, please briefly describe your background, skills, aspirations and interests. Don’t forget to include (a) the position you are applying for, along with the tentative start date and the time duration, and (b) CV and transcripts (unofficial ones suffice). Please also feel free to include any writing or code samples (i.e., links to your papers/articles/GitHub projects).
It’s an honor—and a rare privilege—to be able to serve students. I cherish the opportunity and take responsibility for furthering my students’ interests and careers. My goal as an advisor is to nurture research leaders, who can independently lead a research agenda and solve complex problems. For students who are just starting out, I am involved in the full research cycle: from problem formulation, ideation, brainstorming, interpreting weekly experiments, writing (sometimes too heavily), to providing (sometimes too much) feedback on your talks/posters. As students grow, I provide them with ample opportunities to lead (and initiate) projects and, overall, be independent. Lastly, I love knowing more about the students and am generally keen on organizing lab dinners, celebrating birthdays/festivals, taking trips together, etc.
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