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Information for Prospective Students and Visiting Scholars

In general, I am not able to host visiting students or scholars or summer students. I never have assistantships for students of other universities or departments. However, if I know you or your advisor well, we can discuss mutual interests, and I would be glad to host you, if possible.

If you are not yet admitted to the Department of Computer Science at NCSU or have just been admitted, please do not contact me unless you meet the criteria for applicants listed below. If you have been in the Department of Computer Science for a semester or more, please feel free to contact me.

Please read this page through before contacting me. If you do contact me, please mention that you read this page.

Please don't send me email attachments. You can send your resume as a URL to an html or a pdf file. Or, you can send your resume as plain text as part of your email message.

I am always interested in highly-motivated students. If you have an interest in working with me, here are some things you might do.

Courses

Take courses on topics such as databases, agents, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and distributed computing. Several such courses are offered by the Department of Computer Science at NCSU. More information on the courses I have taught or might teach is available here.

Independent-Study Courses

Almost never would I offer independent-study courses to students who have not worked with me before.

Research Projects

You can find out about ongoing research (by my students and myself) from the project descriptions available from my lab page, as well as from the papers and activities links above. In particular, please look through my columns for short descriptions of topics that interest me - however, in general, these aren't directly my research topics.

You are welcome to talk to my present or past students, but in most cases you will want to take some of the above graduate courses to see if our work suits your interests.

Beyond course projects, lab resources for graduate research are restricted to Computer Science students.

MS and PhD Theses

I encourage students to choose appropriately-sized research projects for their MS and PhD theses. Theoretical topics must also have significant practical applications. Further, for any kind of thesis, it is impossible for me to make guarantees of the total time you might take to finish. It is believed by many that an MS with thesis takes longer than an MCS.

I have no interest in recruiting MS candidates from elsewhere, but if you have been at NCSU for a semester or more, you may contact me.

Visiting Students

We aren't quite set up to host visiting students and I have never hosted any. If I know you or your advisor personally, we can discuss this, but in general I would discourage considering this path.

Financial Support

I offer research assistantships and tuition payments from my research grants. In recent history, about four or so students have been supported in a given semester. Nobody can make guarantees about the future!

On rare occasions, the department can offer a teaching assistantship based on my recommendations. The decision is the department's. However, I use the same criteria for making a TAship recommendation as for offering an RAship.

Financial support is restricted to students who meet the following conditions and morally commit to them.

The main criteria for financial support are as follows.

Applicants

Admission to the graduate program in Computer Science is decided by the admissions committee. Many students transfer into computer science from other disciplines - their admission too is decided by the admissions committee. I believe that grades in computer science courses are a significant factor for such students.