Working with me

General Advising Philosophy

Whether you are a PhD student, master’s student, or an undergraduate, once I decide to work with you on a project, I consider it an adventure where we can explore something interesting together. The most important thing for me is whether we enjoy the time we spend together on a project and whether we can create something that both of us are proud of. I will do my best to make this adventure exciting, and I also hope that you come with similar values.

PhD Students

A PhD is a long (usually 4-6 years) commitment, so it is a long adventure. The ultimate goal of PhD training is to help students become principal investigators (PIs). I know PI is sometimes only viewed as a role in academia. However, to me, it doesn’t matter whether you want to go into industry or academia after graduation. It’s all about helping you develop deep interests in one or several directions and learning the skills to explore them on your own, so that you can lead your future students, team members, or just yourself to create new knowledge and tools for the things you are interested in. Currently, I’m most excited about training advanced user-centric AI agents and building cool HCI systems that can help make our lives easier and better. If you are interested in training models, UT-Austin currently has 600 H200 GPUs (with more on the way), and we are very fortunate to have a large number of GPU hours to do some cool things (thanks to the generous support from TACC). If you are interested in building HCI systems, I have extensive experience in building systems that are actively used by companies, government, and the general public (for example, POTATO and Deliberation.io).

Master’s and Undergraduate Students

I really enjoy working with master’s students and undergraduate students. Usually, I prefer to work on a very specific and well-scoped project, as you might not have much research experience yet. Solid coding and analytical skills are required.

Current Mentees

Shenzhe Zhu (Undergrad at UToronto)
Anshika Agarwal (Master’s student at Stanford)
Andy Dai (Undergrad at Stanford)
Zhenyu Zhang (Master’s student at Stanford)
Tim Chen (Master’s student at Stanford)
David Anugraha (Master’s student at Stanford)
Michelle Liu (Master’s student at Stanford, now at Adobe)
Zhemin Huang (Master’s student at Stanford)
Longju Bai (Master’s student at UMich)

Past Mentees

Fangqing Lin (Master’s student at UMich)
Mingqian Zheng (Master’s student at UMich, now PhD at CMU)
Huaman Sun (Master’s student at UMich, now PhD at Northwestern)