Students

One of the great parts of my job is working with students on research and software development. This page collects information for and about those students.

If you are interested in doing research with me, there are two basic steps:

Get a feel for the kinds of things I and my group do; you can do this by looking at my research projects, reading some of my papers, and/or taking one of my classes. Please also read about my research group.
Get in touch and tell me something about what you find interesting and the kinds of things you might like to do.

If you are curious about the kinds of skills you need or will learn in the course working on research with our group, see my student research skills list.

If you are e-mailing me about our graduate program, please see my e-mail guidance.

For information on applying to graduate school, not just at Boise State, see resources for grad school applications.

Current Openings

Students intrested in doing graduate work me and the People and Information Research Team (PIReT), should apply to our M.S. in Computer Science or Ph.D in Computing program. Feel free to e-mail me, but I am not directly involved in admissions and rarely commit to a student until after the admissions process. I also usually don’t know how many funding lines I will have available until the spring.

I am also interested in involving Boise State undergraduate students in our research. Sometimes I have funds myself for paid research opportunities; the university also has several programs that support undergraduate students involved in faculty research, and I am happy to discuss the possibilities of doing an independent study or an opportunity where you get course credit for research.

Current Students

Amifa Raj (Ph.D)
Ngozi Ihemelandu (Ph.D)
Adam Keener (MS)

Graduated Students

Carlos Segura (MS 2020)

Project: Recommendation Server for LensKit

Mucun Tian (MS 2019)

Thesis: Estimating Error and Bias of Offline Recommender System Evaluation Results
Papers: Mucun Tian and Michael D. Ekstrand. 2020. Estimating Error and Bias in Offline Evaluation Results. Short paper in Proceedings of the 2020 Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR ’20). ACM, 5 pp. DOI 10.1145/3343413.3378004. arXiv:2001.09455 [cs.IR]. NSF PAR 10146883. Acceptance rate: 47%.; Mucun Tian and Michael D. Ekstrand. 2018. Monte Carlo Estimates of Evaluation Metric Error and Bias. Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations 148. Boise State University. Presented at the REVEAL 2018 Workshop on Offline Evaluation for Recommender Systems, a workshop at RecSys 2018. DOI 10.18122/cs_facpubs/148/boisestate. NSF PAR 10074452.

Sushma Channamsetty (MS 2016 @ TXST)

Thesis: Recommender Response to User Profile Diversity and Popularity Bias
Papers: Sushma Channamsetty and Michael D. Ekstrand. 2017. Recommender Response to Diversity and Popularity Bias in User Profiles. Short paper in Proceedings of the 30th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference. AAAI, pp. 657–660.

Mohammed Imran R Kazi (MS 2016 @ TXST)

Thesis: Exploring Potentially Discriminatory Biases in Book Recommendation
Papers: Michael D. Ekstrand, Mucun Tian, Mohammed R. Imran Kazi, Hoda Mehrpouyan, and Daniel Kluver. 2018. Exploring Author Gender in Book Rating and Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ’18). ACM, pp. 242–250. DOI 10.1145/3240323.3240373. arXiv:1808.07586v1 [cs.IR]. Acceptance rate: 17.5%.

Vaibhav Mahant (MS 2016 @ TXST)

Thesis: Improving Top-N Evaluation of Recommender Systems
Papers: Michael D. Ekstrand and Vaibhav Mahant. 2017. Sturgeon and the Cool Kids: Problems with Random Decoys for Top-N Recommender Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 30th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference. AAAI, pp. 639–644.

Shuvabrata Saha (MS 2016 @ TXST)

Co-advised with Dr. Apan Qasem.

Thesis: A Multi-Objective Autotuning Framework For The Java Virtual Machine