Read First/Funding
I do not have any funding for students. I do not have any RA funding, and I do not assign/pick TAs. If you email me asking for any kind of TA/RA funding, even as a side question, I will ignore your email. The rest of this page is organized as a kind of FAQ. You should read this entire page before contacting me as a student who I have not personally worked with before, including the sections that you do not believe correspond to your situation. This is important as I receive ~100 emails a day, and simply can not give attention to all the things that I would like to give attention to.
As a student, how do I work with you?
I tend to work with PhD students whom I'm either (co)advising or prospectively co-advising with one of the existing faculty members. For Masters and Undergraduate students, I have unfortunately had a very high "drop" rate of students stopping their work or not responding, so I am exceptionally picky now due to my limited free time. I will require you to take a thesis option to do the work for credit as an incentive/stop-gap so that the work we do together will be seen through, and you will need to show evidence of your ability to do top-quality technical work.
The best way to show evidence of technical ability is to take a class with one of the professors I regularly collaborate with (or mine when I am teaching), do very well in their class, and use them as a referral to work with me. This works well as I prefer to co-advise students rather than solo-advise. This protects you from situations where my work obligations prevent me from being as active as I would like. For AI/ML focused work, Professors you should consider a class with include: Frank Ferraro, Cynthia Matuszek, Tim Oates, and Manas Gaur.
How do I make a good impression in an email?
A good email is one that is written with reasonably correct grammar and spelling, and has something interesting to say. I receive about 50 emails each semester from students (even outside of UMBC) explaining how working with me will benefit them. A good life lesson for your career is that you should never lead by how something will benefit you. Of course it will; that's why you are sending the email. How does it benefit me (in the royal sense), to work with you - given my limited free time? In general, you will get much farther when you need something from a person X if your conversation with them includes why this will benefit person X.
The best way to demonstrate benefit to the other party is to show, not tell, that you will be able to do interesting and useful work. For a Professor/academic, reading some of their papers and communicating an interesting idea of how it could be extended in a technical way is a very good strategy. Simply referencing the paper, saying that you thought it was interesting, or making a generic statement will not beget a reply. Similarly, having code examples of what you are capable of that are well documented and explained also shows that you can follow through on your ideas.
If your code is completely undocumented or your email is highly generic, people won't reply. You know your email is generic if you can replace the subject (e.g., paper) with another subject, and the email still makes sense.
I'm looking for a job/internship, do you have any?
I don't love it, but Booz Allen can generally only accept U.S. citizens for internships and full-time work due to restrictions as a government contractor. You will not be an exception to this general requirement. Attempting to ask for such an exception will get neither of us anywhere.
For normal internships, please look up the Booz Allen Summer Games. You should apply in the Fall semester, it is generally full by December. If you are capable and can demonstrate research potential, I hire a few Analytic Fellows each year for research work during the summer. For full-time employment, you should look for job openings at https://careers.boozallen.com/ that appeal to you. We operate like an army of small companies, so I only have an influence on the job openings my team makes, and most of them are not my job openings. If I do not have a pre-existing personal relationship with you, I will be pointing you to the careers.boozallen.com site.
I'm looking for generic career advice/I have a technical question - can I schedule a Zoom meeting?
No, do not attempt to schedule a video call with me if we do not have a pre-existing relationship. My schedule is insufficiently free. If you send an email with your question, you are much more likely to get a faster and more detailed reply, as I can reply during one of my breaks. I'm generally very happy to answer these questions, though if it's a very generic one, I might just point you to another resource (though, I do hope/believe I'm being useful at pointing you to something useful). To check that you are actually reading through this, include "zmail" in your subject as a student so that I know you've actually read this page. Use this phrase for any reason you are sending me an initial email, even if not for Zoom, as this is my check to see that you are reading this and allows me to filter out students who have not.
Would you be interested in giving a guest lecture, symposium talk, or other presentation to my class/department?
Almost always, the answer is yes, and I love doing this kind of stuff. Please include potential dates/times, and what you are hoping I might talk about. If it is in the continental U.S., there is a good chance I can even do so in person if you can cover travel/hotel. Sometimes, I can cover it myself if it's not something like cross-coast travel. This takes me some time to get approved, so please don't ask with short notice. If it is international, it will almost certainly need to be online only.
What areas of research do you co-advise?
I am interested in almost any area of machine learning and my research. I have particular interests in reproducibility, efficient algorithm implementations, and meta-science, which are niche interests (so maybe not good for certain career goals). I always have some ideas I'd like someone to work on. I'm also happy to work on other projects with folks in different areas.
Where should I email you?
You should almost certainly email me at