Openings

Positions Available in my Group

You may also want to look at "Propsective Students" on my FAQ page, which covers how to apply and what sorts of students I'm interested in.

More broadly, I'm looking for technically strong people who are also interested in the beauty of language but not afraid of the messy ways language is applied in the real world. Experience with, or fondness for, recreational question answering (trivia, puzzles, language games, etc.) is a plus.

Former students from my group have gone on to a range of strong academic and industry positions. In academia, former students include He He (faculty at NYU), Alvin Grissom (faculty at Haverford), Mohit Iyyer (faculty at UMD), Asad Sayeed (faculty at the University of Gothenburg), and You Lu (faculty at Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology). In industry and applied research, former students include Eric Wallace (former UG, OpenAI), Forough Poursabzi (former PhD, Microsoft), Ke Zhai (former PhD, Apple), Yoo Yeon Sung (former PhD, Hippocratic AI), Michelle Yuan (former PhD, Oracle), and Pedro Rodriguez (former PhD, Meta). I'm very proud of how widely they've taken ideas from NLP, question answering, and human-centered AI into both academia and practice.

NTU is an excellent place to do this work. NTU is ranked 12th globally in the QS World University Rankings, and NTU's College of Computing and Data Science has especially strong AI visibility: NTU is ranked 4th globally in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in the 2026 QS subject rankings, while CCDS was ranked 2nd globally in Artificial Intelligence in the U.S. News Best Global Universities subject rankings. Singapore is also in the middle of a lively AI and tech ecosystem, with major AI activity from groups including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Nvidia, Alibaba Cloud, and ByteDance. Singapore is also beautifully multicultural, but English is the official language of NTU. See also this Straits Times overview of AI labs in Singapore and this article on Alibaba Cloud's Singapore AI push.

Postdocs

I'm interested in hiring motivated postdocs at NTU who'd be able to help me build a new lab. I'm particularly interested in novel approaches to question answering (e.g., using RL-driven RAG over multiple modalities), human-in-the-loop evaluation and model curation, and improving AI evaluation.

But really, I'm looking for strong applicants who can help me build a new lab in Singapore while maintaining existing collaborations in Maryland. So if you have a strong background and can make the case why we'd be a good fit, please apply! Postdoc applications will be handled on a rolling basis, with serious review starting in November 2026.

NTU's AI for X Postdoctoral Fellowship (Deadline October 30!) may also be a good fit for prospective postdocs who want to work with me.

If you are interested in a postdoc with me, you can also express your interest here.

NTU is also hosting online briefing sessions for the AI for X Postdoctoral Fellowship:

Graduate Students

I am looking to admit at least two graduate students for Fall 2027 (and potentially more) in one of several areas:

  1. Evaluation of AI
  2. Human-AI teaming
  3. Efficient approaches to language modeling / QA
  4. Multimodal QA (both methods and datasets)

The ideal candidate is someone who is very technically involved in the workings of modern NLP methods and is interested in applying them to human-centered tasks like human--computer cooperation for question answering or measuring interpretability. More broadly, I'm looking for technically strong people who are also interested in the beauty of language but not afraid of the messy ways language is applied in the real world. Experience with, or fondness for, recreational question answering (trivia, puzzles, language games, etc.) is a plus.

Prospective students should also look at the CCDS PhD in Computing and Data Science program page.

For the August 2027 intake, the application window opens on October 1, 2026, and the general NTU deadline for research-program applications is January 31, 2027.

In addition to applying through NTU's official PhD application portal, please also email me with the subject line GRADAPP-2027. Include your CV, a link to your webpage (if you have one), and 3–5 sentences in the body of the email explaining your background and why you think we would be a good research match.

I'll also be doing a public Q&A session focused on PhD admissions on Monday, September 21, 2026 at 9:00 PM Singapore time / 6:30 PM India time / 3:00 PM Central European time / 9:00 AM U.S. East Coast time in case you'd like to ask general questions there: YouTube live session.

Undergrads / Virtual Internships

For the moment, I'm hoping to focus internship / undergraduate research around our QANTA project. Take a look at the projects that I've listed there. The tryout project is one of the "first step" for each of the ideas. If you're able to work independently enough to make good progress on one of these projects, then you have sufficient background to work on these sorts of projects. Note that not all of these are AI/ML per se! Some are creating interfaces, hooking up to other code, some are editing videos.

Students interested in summer 2027 opportunities may also want to look at the Global Connect Fellowship and check back in early 2027 for updates about summer 2027 opportunities.