PhD and Postdoc Positions in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Music and Theater Arts 

In Fall 2024, I will be joining Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as faculty, with a shared position between Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Music and Theater Arts (MTA). Currently, I am a Research Scientist at Magenta in Google DeepMind, working on generative models and interfaces to support human-AI partnerships in music making.

I am the creator of the ML model Coconet that powered Google’s first AI Doodle, the Bach Doodle. In two days, Coconet harmonized 55 million melodies from users around the world. In 2018, I created Music Transformer, a breakthrough in generating music with long-term structure, and the first successful adaptation of the transformer architecture to music. Our ICLR paper is currently the most cited paper in music generation.

I hold a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila, and an adjunct professor at University of Montreal. I was a judge then organizer for AI Song Contest 2020-22. I did my PhD at Harvard University, master’s at the MIT Media Lab, and a dual bachelor’s at University of Southern California in music composition and CS.

If you are interested in working with me as a PhD student, consider applying to MIT EECS (by December 15th). In the application form, you can find my name (“Huang, Anna”) in the “potential research advisor” dropdown menu.

For indicating “research field of interest” in the application form, we don’t have music technology included in the dropdown menu yet (it’ll be there next year!). For now, you can choose any field you’re most interested in, such as (but not limited to) ML General Interests, Natural Language and Speech Processing, Reinforcement Learning, Deep Learning, Human Computer Interaction, or Cognitive AI, etc.

Letters of recommendations are accepted up till the end of December. We’ll reach out if additional information is needed. You’ll probably hear back from MIT in February. Best of luck!

I’m actively recruiting Postdocs, at MIT for Fall 2024, and at Mila for early 2024 (with a possibility of continuing at MIT). Email me if you’re interested, with your CV and research interests. Thanks!