Interested in graduate study? I am always interested to hear from enthusiastic students who wish to pursue a PhD in my research areas of interest. I am particularly interested in students with a sound mathematical background and who are interested in a mix of theory and application in the general area of learning from data.

PhD students in my group tend to come from a diverse range of backgrounds. For example, we currently have students with degrees in physics, applied mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, and economics in the group. A computer science undergraduate degree is not a requirement to join my group or to get a PhD in the department (some extra coursework may be involved for students who are missing some of the required background).

Most of our projects involve modeling of real-world data sets involving time series, images, multivariate data from areas as diverse as finance, diagnostic medicine, computational biology, atmospheric science, planetary geology, and cognitive science. In addition, on the more theoretical side, we like to explore fundamental generative probabilistic models for such data and develop algorithms which can learn these models from data.

Here's how I suggest you can explore whether doing a PhD with my group would be a good match with your interests.

• Have a look at some of our research papers which describe recent projects in our group, which you can download from my home page. You probably won't understand much of the jargon, but you will get an idea of the nature of the research we do.
• Visit the department Web site to get a better idea of the ICS department. ICS is an exciting place, we have some very interesting research being conducted in areas like information retrieval, multimedia databases, machine learning, data mining, probabilistic reasoning, computational biology, embedded systems, and many more. This is a fun place to do research! We also have an online newsletter with all the latest happenings in the department.
• Visit the main UC Irvine Web site to see what's going on campus as a whole. UC Irvine is a very forward-thinking university and an excellent environment for academic study and research. Check out the online newstand for the latest breaking news at UCI.
• Finally, have a look at the the PhD application and admissions process and note the January 15th deadline. This year we have over 20 graduate fellowships to give out to US-based graduate applicants (plus many more research and teaching assistantships to applicants in general) so if you are interested, please apply!

If you have any specific questions about doing a Phd in my research group, please feel free to email me

smyth@ics.uci.edu