PhD Students (Spring/Fall 2024), Postdocs, and Interns in AI/ML/NLP/CV/Stats/Data Science

Why UNC CS?

• • Ranked 29th in the United States (US News), consistently among the top 5 public universities.

• World rankings: 29 (ARWU), 41 (US News).

• Department of Computer Science is ranked 24th in the United States. Other relevant rankings include Statistics ranked 11th in the United States and Biostatistics ranked 5th in the United States (US News).
• We have a strong AI program, with the Core AI track (CV+ML+NLP+Robotics) ranked 21st in the United States according to CSRankings (https://csrankings.org/#/index?vision&mlmining&nlp&robotics&us).
• Located in the renowned Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, near the city of Raleigh. The park is home to over 300 companies, including Apple’s AI campus, Google’s new engineering center, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Lenovo’s global headquarters, Cisco, Red Hat headquarters, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. There are abundant internship and job opportunities in this area.

About the PI:

Huaxiu Yao will join UNC-Chapel Hill as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and also hold a position at the UNC School of Data Science and Society starting in the Fall of 2023. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. Huaxiu’s research interests focus on building large-scale AI models (a.k.a., foundation models) that are reliable and responsive, applying these models to areas such as healthcare, drug discovery, and geographic information systems. His research work has been published in top machine learning conferences (ICML, NeurIPS, and ICLR). Huaxiu has established close collaborations with universities such as Stanford, University of Washington, CMU, Columbia, UIUC, UCLA, as well as industry research labs like Google Brain, Meta AI, Amazon Science, Salesforce Research, and Apple. He serves as a senior program committee member or area chair for top conferences and has organized the first ICML Workshop on Pre-training and the 5th and 6th NeurIPS Workshop on Meta-learning. Additionally, Huaxiu has extensive experience in mentoring students, with his undergraduate interns successfully admitted to leading institutions such as Stanford, UCSD, UW, CMU for Ph.D. studies.

For more information about the mentor, please visit the following links:

Personal homepage: https://huaxiuyao.mystrikingly.com/

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=A20BZnQAAAAJ&hl=en

Recent research interests (including but not limited to):

My research focuses primarily on resolving important problems in AI, machine learning, and natural language processing, as well as their applications in real-world. Specifically, I have recently been particularly interested in the following areas:

1. [ML] Reliable and responsible machine learning (esp. on foundation models, LLMs)
   1. Distribution shifts, continual/meta-learning
   2. Model bias, fairness, toxicity
   3. Uncertainty estimation, model calibration
2. [ML] Interactive machine learning with human-in-the-loop (e.g., RLHF)
3. [ML Applications] AI for Science and Social Good
   1. Medical AI (drug discovery, genomics, healthcare, etc.)
   2. GeoAI (smart cities, ecology, etc.)

What we will offer?

• PhD students with full scholarships (TA/RA), including tuition, health insurance, and living stipend. According to CSStipendRankings, UNC offers the 5th highest living stipend in the United States.
• Exceptional interns will receive corresponding allowances.
• Eligible students receive assistance for green card applications.
• Sufficient computing resources provided by the lab.
• Excellent candidates have opportunities to visit top schools (e.g., Stanford) or pursue internships and employment at leading industrial research labs.

Requirements:

• • Applicants with undergraduate or higher degrees in CS/EE/Data Science/Stats/Math or related STEM majors.
  • Have a solid background in mathematics and rich coding experiences.

• GRE scores not required.

How to reach us?

If you are interested in our recruitment program, please complete the application form and send an email to huaxiu.recruiting@gmail.com with the subject line “X Application + Your Name” (X=Postdoc/PhD/Intern).

• PhD student and intern application form: https://forms.gle/KbZFVnMt8qtP74eK9
• Postdoc application form: https://forms.gle/sX1wV84amG8BjGJo6

Please mention in the email that you have completed the form. We look forward to having you join us!