I am always happy to meet up and chat with intellectually ambitious undergraduate and graduate students looking for research opportunities.
I like to work with outstanding students who are curious and who are unafraid to fail. Our research is about understanding human behavior at scale and designing computational tools that empower individual decision making. Human behavior is messy. More often than not, my students will examine ideas from different disciplines to explain what they observe. Thus, I expect students who join my group to be comfortable reading and synthesizing concepts from various CS subfields (e.g., HCI + data science). They should also be interested in exploring ideas beyond Computer Science (e.g., Behavioral Economics). Students who join my group should have a strong interest in developing theory, developing algorithms and models, or being strong in building systems.
If you are an undergrad, I'll pair you with a grad student on a project that excites you. It would be best if you planned on spending around 10 hours a week on research. I realize that this is a difficult ask of undergrads who are super-busy. For research to be rewarding, it requires time and consistent effort. Two past undergrads won CRA undergrad research awards (honorable mention) their research with me: Harshay Shah in 2018 and Yuxin Xiao in 2019.
I am happy to take on M.S. students if there is a good match; I require that M.S. students perform original, publishable research.
Prospective Students: If you are interested in working in my group, please do fill this response form. Your responses will help me identity possible matches with our work.The best time to meet me would be during my office hours on Wednesdays between 4-5 pm.
Current Group: (Ph.D.:) Aditya Karan (collective action), Naina Balepur (networks & game theory), Tiffany Li (education at scale), Ti-Chung Cheng (individual decision making), Junting Wang (recommender systems) (M.S.:) Andy Lee (algorithmic game theory), Jaya Singh (recommender systems), Samraj Moorjani (natural language generation) (Awesome undergrads): Harini Arumugham, Garima Sharma, Adit Agarwal, Adi Srinivasan, Ashay Parikh, Daniel Qian, Faraz Siddiqi, Praneet Rathi, Rohan Gumaste, Jintian Song
Past Ph.D students, (Illinois:) Ziang Xiao (2022, MSR, then Asst. Prof. Johns Hopkins), Mingkun Gao (2021, LinkedIn), Aravind Sankar (2021, Meta), Subham De (2021, Meta), Himel Dev (2021, Snap), Adit Krishnan (2021, Microsoft), Suhansanu Kumar (2021, Meta), Kanika Narang (2020, Meta), (ASU:) Munmun De Choudhury (2011, Associate Professor, Georgia Tech.), Yu-Ru Lin (2010, Associate Professor, Univ. of Pittsburgh), Yinpeng Chen (2009, Microsoft Research)
Past M.S. students, (Illinois:) Junting Wang (2022, Illinois PhD student), Bo Zheng (2020, Microsoft), Ankit Kumar (2020), Haricharan Cheruvu (2020, Microsoft), Charles Shang (2019), Ashish Agrawal (2018, Amazon), Wei-Chun Lee (2017, Google), Po-Shiun Ho (2017, Bloomberg), Chinmay Sanjay Kulkarni (2016, Salesforce)