Why Join Rutgers?

History and Reputation

• Founded in 1766, Rutgers University is older than the United States of America.
• Rutgers has one of the Top 30 CS departments in the US.¹
• Rutgers has notable alumni in many different areas, from Sex and the City star Kristin Davis and famous pop art artist Roy Lichtenstein to influential scientists such as Milton Friedman, the famous economist, or Selman Waksman, who coined the word antibiotics and whose team discovered numerous well-known such antibiotics, saving millions of lives.

Research

• Other Rutgers professors working on natural language processing include Matthew Stone (dialogue systems and cognitive aspects), Sungjin Ahn (deep learning), Yongfeng Zhang (information retrieval and explainable ML), Michael Lesk (IR, lexical semantics), Chirag Shah (IR, conversational agents), and Patrick Shafto (cognitive science).
• Rutgers is also extremely strong in areas such as computer vision, robotics, and data mining. For instance, Prof. Tomasz Imielinski and his collaborators started the area of association rule mining and have one of the Top 50 most-cited papers in all of computer science. Rutgers has 10 papers at KDD 2017 and 3 at ICML 2017.
• The Rutgers School of Communication and Information is among the Top 10 in the country.
• The Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute has set up world class supercomputers, one of which has over 20,000 cores and over 140 TB of RAM.
• Apart from this, Rutgers is perhaps most well-known for being one of the leaders in theoretical computer science, with numerous Gödel Prizes awarded to our faculty.
• We are also affiliated with RUCCS, the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, which brings together people from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, etc. Note that Rutgers' Philosophy Department is among the Top 3 in the US.
• Rutgers has good ties to industry. Several faculty have been successfully co-founded startups, e.g. CS Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis' startup Teoma was bought by Ask, which in turn was later acquired for $1.85 Billion. Rutgers alumnus Tsvi Gal is the CTO of Morgan Stanley. Rutgers alumnus Dev Ittycheria is the CEO of MongoDB.

Location

• Rutgers is just 25 minutes away from Princeton and 50 minutes from Manhattan, New York City. Rutgers offers excellent opportunities for collaboration with industry and various other kinds of institutions. Google, Microsoft, Bloomberg, and many others are in Manhattan, as are many other universities, and indeed many of our faculty choose to live there, since it is quite manageable as a daily commute with very frequent trains and buses. Universities with such prime locations have the best opportunities for growth, because the best faculty and students nowadays typically want to move to a place where their partners will easily be able to find employment.
• The local area around our campus also has a long history of scholarship and inventions. It was here that Thomas Edison invented the first practical version of the light bulb as well as the notion of recording and playing sound (specifically, the phonograph a.k.a. record player or turntables, as used by DJs). Later on, the area hosted Bell Labs, world-famous for the invention of the transistor, the field of information theory, the Unix operating system, the programming languages C and C++, digital photography, and many more. IEEE has its main operations center just 5 minutes away from campus. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton is famous for Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Kurt Gödel.
• New Jersey is known as the Garden State and is a good place for families. Its famous beaches are about 45 minutes away from campus.

Diversity

• Our lab is committed to diversity and inclusion with respect to gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, abilities, etc. Gerard de Melo has close ties to three different continents and has been a faculty member at Tsinghua University, often considered China's most prestigious university for Science & Technology. The majority of the CS graduate students hail from places such as India, China, Iran, and so on, in addition to locals from the US. The nearby town of Edison, NJ is famous across the US for having a large Indian and Chinese community.
• More generally, Rutgers is very highly ranked in terms of diversity, and our students enjoyed the speech by President Barack Obama linked below.

How to Join Us?

• PhD and MS hiring: Apply via the standard admissions system. For PhD applications, make sure to enter "Natural Language Processing" as one of your most desired areas if you want me to review your application, and please also attach a Resume. If accepted, we will normally cover your tuition fees and health insurance as well as provide a stipend for your living expenses (e.g. $25,969 per year as of 2018), as long as you are making good progress towards your PhD and fulfilling any assigned teaching assistant duties. Additionally, PhD students at Rutgers typically spend the summer months doing internships at companies or at research institutions, which also provide an additional salary.
• Post-doc positions: Get in touch with me directly.
• Research internships: We are only taking interns with their own scholarships. Due to the administrative workload, we currently mostly only take visitors with funding for 4 months or longer, and have a preference for those able to visit beyond the summer months (because many lab members are away on company internships during the summer).
• Getting local scholarships: In many countries, there are scholarships for post-docs or research internships in the US, e.g. DAAD for Germans, CSC for Chinese nationals, SNSF for Swiss people, ASEF for Slovenians, etc.

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