If you have a bachelors degree or a masters degree and are looking to do a PhD, I'm looking for a PhD student who is interested in the relationship between the trivia community and the machine learning community to look at questions like "how does preventing cheating in online quiz bowl tournaments create adversarial examples for machine learning algorithms". This does not have to be someone who is a programming guru. This would likely be in the iSchool, not computer science (but it could be in CS if you have the appropriate math/CS background).
Past people who have had this role have gone on to faculty at UMass Amherst (Mohit Iyyer), faculty at NYU (He He), and a research scientist at Facebook (Pedro Rodriguez).
The ideal candidate would be:
Someone who is active and respected in trivia community
Someone who can run large / complicated trivia tournaments
Someone respected in the trivia community
Someone interested in sociology and/or education (undergrad degree in sociology, education, psychology, history, cultural studies)
Someone who is an excellent writer
Someone willing to learn how to program to do basic machine learning / statistics analysis
Someone interested in a sociological anlysis of research fields (e.g., researchers who make question answering systems) and common interest communities (e.g., trivia nerds)
Jordan Boyd-Graber
UMD (College Park, MD), Faculty Advisor 2018-present
UC Boulder, Founder / Faculty Advisor 2014-2017
UMD (College Park, MD), Faculty Advisor 2010-2014
Princeton, Player 2004-2009
Caltech (Pasadena, CA), Player / President 2000-2004
Ark Math & Science (Hot Springs, AR), Player 1998-2000
Monticello High School, Player 1997-1998
Mods: feel free to delete or move ... I've never seen a post like this on the board before, but I'm probably the only person who'd make such a post.
Jordan Boyd-Graber
UMD (College Park, MD), Faculty Advisor 2018-present
UC Boulder, Founder / Faculty Advisor 2014-2017
UMD (College Park, MD), Faculty Advisor 2010-2014
Princeton, Player 2004-2009
Caltech (Pasadena, CA), Player / President 2000-2004
Ark Math & Science (Hot Springs, AR), Player 1998-2000
Monticello High School, Player 1997-1998
Right now I’m just a sophomore in CS who’s taken half a class in NLP, but if you’re still looking for students in around 2023 to do quizbowl related work I’d be super interested in being a part of it!