I very strongly recommend that M.S. students wait until the beginning of their second semester at Stony Brook before selecting their masters project. It is much better to spend a semester taking classes and getting to know what area you are really interested in than to grab the first project that will take you on. Typically my M.S. students arrive at Stony Brook in August, select their project in January, work on them in the spring, maybe in the summer, and then a lot the next fall.

I never take on on any M.S. students or Independent Study students in the Fall or the Summer, so there is no value in contacting me then.

Instead, I encourage M.S. students potentially interested in working with me to take a full load of courses offered in the fall. If I am offering a graduate class, try to take it if there is room. If you want to take my course and it is full, show up to the first class period. Do not email me before the first class.

In January, I will typically take on three or four of the best masters students who are interested in working me, as judged by their performance in my class (particularly the course project) and their first-semester Stony Brook courses/grades.

All projects will require close interaction with my current Ph.D. students, and require physical presence in our lab for at least 16 hours a week. To see what my students are doing, check out the Data Science Laboratory homepage.

Interested students should send email with the subject "CSE523 Projects" that include links to their resume, personal website and github/bitbucket if available. Wait until you have received your first semester grades, then include these in your email.

Come January, I will also contemplate taking on one or two student/teams with a proposal of a project of their own conception -- if it is sufficiently interesting to me. A suitable project: (1) has an interesting deliverable that will have a life after the completion of your project, such as a website, an app, or a database, and (2) can be completed by you fairly independently. I am looking here for entrepreneurial, self-motivated students.

Examples of such projects include:

• Watch the Birdie -- This Android App identifies American bird species in images, making use of image-processing techniques and location-based bird observation data for classification. (Nikhil Patwardhan)
• Fame Match -- This Apple iOS game asks you to identify the most meaningful description/category a historical figure belongs in, according to our algorithmic methods for evaluating Wikipedia descriptions. (Zichao Dai)

If this interests you, send me a one page project proposal and your resume at the end of the semester. Good luck!