• Thank you for your interest in studying with me. You should check out the list of possible thesis topics on my webpage to see if your and my research interests overlap.
• I'm saving up some money this year (2011) to take on a new Ph.D. or Master's Student, preferably to start Spring 2012. I'm applying for a couple of grants; if more money becomes available for financial support, I'll revise this page. Sometimes special opportunities arise too that allow me to commit to more supervision, like co-supervision with a colleague.

If you're not at SFU already

• Interested external students should start with the Simon Fraser University website. Details of admission can be found at the Student Services site. Information about applying for graduate study in the School of Computing Science is posted here.
• Please understand that students are admitted by a School-level competition and not directly by any faculty member. I cannot review your application or offer advice on entry to SFU.
• To communicate with me, don't send E-mail attachments with your C.V. or other information about you. I simply do not have the time to print all the documentation I get, let alone look at it. If you feel that the fit between your background and interests and mine is special, you should send me a hardcopy of your documentation. Another approach is to send me a hardcopy of the application material as you submit it to the School. If you want to go with a personal communication, please read on for a bit more guidance on what extra information would help me evaluate your application.

• I'm currently working mainly on statistical-relational learning, so an ideal background would be a combination of logic and statistics. It would be great if you knew both what d-separation means and what an Herbrand interpretation is. Or at least what a Bayes net is and how a well-formed formula or SQL query is defined.
• The best research, in my opinion, combines a theoretical foundation with empirical evaluation (simulations) and good scientific writing. I understand that you may have gaps in any, or all, of these areas. After all, you are coming to graduate school because you want to learn and improve. Still, how far we can go in our work together depends on where we start. So if you send me material about yourself, please include the following.
  1. The hardest proof you've ever done. Original research is best, but even a course assignment is informative. If you haven't done any hard proofs, just note that. If you have more than one, just pick one. I can always ask for more.
  2. The best English you've written. Preferably scientific English but other kinds of prose are fine. Or even poetry.
  3. The best code you've written. Any common programming language is fine. A brief explanation of what the program is supposed to do (input-output) would be helpful. Please don't spend your valuable time explaining it in detail, I just want to see what you've done already. Hopefully the comments and documentation you wrote when you produced the code will explain it well enough.