Prospective Students

If you are interested on doing research with me (or you already are my student and want some general guidance on your research), read the appropriate sections below, divided by undergraduate and graduate students. I am always looking for good students, so check out for adverts in FindAPhD, where I advertise funded and unfunded projects.

In the past, I kept the website with general guidance for students in Brazil (which I occasionally advise as a guest researcher at PUCRS).

Graduate Students

Former Students

After you head out into the world, you will be called upon to do a number of things, here are some of the tips I collected:

Prospective Students

A note to prospective students at any level: I do not respond to mass mailings (unless you have made an outstanding AI software that convinces me yours is not a mass email). If you do not take the time to do your homework, then I will not spend more than the 2 seconds it takes to delete your email (and mark you as a spammer). By homework, I mean reading a couple of pages in my website and the abstract of a couple of my papers to discover if I am a good fit for your areas of interest in research. Note that this does not mean I will not advise work outside my specific areas of interest within AI---should you want me to advise you, explaining to me why you are excited about a different area is an excellent start. I do not take part-time research students. The commitment and amount of free time required to think of innovative research ideas is non-trivial.

If you want to have an idea of the types of work I have advised in the past (besides reading my papers with my students) I have curated all MSc and PhD manuscripts I advised in Github.

Current Students

Below I summarise a few tips for my current students.

Learn to Write

Before you start doing any kind of research, you need to be able to write about it in decent English. Understandably, for most of prospective students in Brazil english is not your first language, so there are two obstacles to conveying research ideas: mastering the language, and writing about research in the best style. For the first problem, there is not much I can do. However, for the second one, there is a slew of resources available on the web, which I have condensed in a site covering writing style.

How to finish a graduate programme

Michael Luck's lecture on How to finish a graduate programme and have a successful defence.

Jason Eisner's advice on how to write a PhD thesis.

Conference Impact Ratings

While the current trend for academic evaluation is to avoid using impact ratings, these impact ratings are indicative of the comparative prestige (and sometimes hardness) of the venues in the rankings. This is, of course, indicative. As one might imagine, whenever funding bodies introduce a numeric score to make decisions, research becomes a game, which in turns creates great distortions. Nevertheless, these are still useful to help one get the general picture of each research area.

PhD Checkpoints in Aberdeen

TBA

Useful links

Undergraduate Students

Honours projects

Potential honours projects

For suggestions of potential final year projects, I have set up a small Github repository with ideas for final year projects.

Current Students

TBA