For Prospective PhD Students

I receive too many inquiries from prospective graduate students to respond to you all personally, so I created this page to try and answer some common questions. Comments here reflect my personal opinion, not necessarily department or university policy.

If you are interested in coming to TTIC as a Ph.D. student and possibly working with me, here are the main things you should know:

• Each year I look for a small number of new PhD students, so there's no need to ask "Are you looking for a new PhD student this year?"
• My main area of research is in computer vision, especially (although not exclusively) as it related to human-computer interaction. That is, I am interested in building and understanding vision systems that "watch" people in order to identify them, track them, or understand their gestures or activity, and systems that enable important applications such as Augmented Reality.
• I am also interested in how this area of research integrates with other perceptual and intelligent technologies, such as speech I/O, haptics, user modeling, etc. If your primary interest is in one of these related areas, your best course would be to work with someone else as a thesis advisor and collaborate with my group. I am, however, interested in multimodal interaction - HCI technologies that combine these modalities.
• I'm particularly interested in these (and related) problems in the context of mobile computing and augmented reality.
• I am always interested in finding motivated students to join our Ph.D. program. For my group, I look for students with the following background (these are not all requirements, but the more you satisfy the better):
  • B.S. or M.S. in computer science or electrical engineering
  • Coursework and understanding of signal processing, image processing, pattern recognition, computer graphics, and computer vision
  • Good programming skills and experience (especially important for those with an EE background)
  • Solid math background, solid probability and statistics background
  • Background in artificial intelligence, human and biological vision, multimedia, and HCI are also helpful
  • Publications and/or significant experience in computer vision research or building real-time vision/imaging systems
• If you are wondering whether or not you should apply, consider the above criteria.
• If you are wondering about transferring from another PhD program, we generally do not encourage this, but if you can justify the reasons, we may consider it.
• Until that time, there is nothing I can do to help your chances. After the application deadline, I will see all the applications in which I was specified as a potential advisor. So, if you might be interested in working with me, be sure to mention it in your application.
• Due to a high volume of requests, I am generally not available to meet with you personally before the application deadline. However, if you are among the finalists, I may ask to meet with you (in person or online).
• I encourage you to send me your resume, statement of research interests, and any relevant publications. Even though I may not respond directly, I will look through these to help guide my selections. If I have questions or comments, I will contact you.
• I won't be able to tell you in advance your chances of being admitted or being funded, and I do not have research positions to hire you for in advance.
• Admission to our PhD program is very competitive, and the number of accepted students in my area may vary from year to year. If you are not accepted, please do not send TTIC (or me) email asking why, or how you can improve your application for next year; again, we just receive too many applications to be able to fully address such questions.

Funding / Research and Teaching Assistantships

• PhD students at TTIC are funded for the duration of their degree. Some, of course, have external fellowships that they bring with them. It does not help to ask "Do you have RA openings for me?" Teaching assistantships are not a primary form of student funding.
• Some faculty discuss advising a student after the student has taken, and performed extremely well in, the professor's course.

Also be sure to peruse the online information about our PhD program at https://www.ttic.edu/phd-program.

Other things to look at:

• Student links