Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Computer Science Faculty, Resources, and PhD/Intern Recruitment Overview

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) is a renowned private research university founded in 1824, ranked #51 overall in the 2023 US News rankings, with its computer science program ranked #60 and computer engineering #42.

The computer science department is rapidly expanding, having hired four new professors this year and planning to add ten more within five years. RPI boasts substantial computing resources, including the AiMOS supercomputer cluster with nearly 2,000 V100 GPUs and plans for further upgrades.

RPI maintains a close AI research partnership with IBM Research, jointly operating the AIRC research center. Outstanding PhD students can become AIH Scholars, receiving mentorship from both RPI faculty and IBM researchers, and have ample opportunities for summer internships at IBM Research.

Location: Troy, NY, near Albany, with easy train access to New York City. The Capital Region is emerging as a major US chip‑R&D hub, featuring the Albany NanoTech Complex ($20 billion) and IBM Research AI Hardware Research Center, offering abundant internship and employment prospects.

Faculty Introductions

Dr. Yao Ma (formerly at Michigan State University, joining RPI in July 2023) focuses on graph learning, trustworthy AI, and data‑centric AI, with publications in top venues such as ICLR, ICML, KDD, NeurIPS, WWW, SIGIR, and TKDE. He authored the book "Deep Learning on Graphs" (Chinese edition "图深度学习").

Dr. Futian Fan (joining RPI in January 2024) leads the AIDrugLab, working on generative models for drug design and synthesis, single‑cell genomics, clinical trials, and large language models for drug discovery. His research appears in venues like Nature, AAAI, ICLR, KDD, and NeurIPS, and he contributes to community projects such as the Chinese translation of the "Deep Learning" textbook.

Dr. Hu Ziniu (joining RPI in January 2024) investigates the integration of deep learning with symbolic reasoning, focusing on knowledge graphs, LLMs for structured data, differentiable neural‑symbolic AI, and scalable graph representation learning. He has received awards including WWW'19 Best Paper and DLG‑KDD'20 Best Student Paper.

Recruitment Information

Open positions for multiple PhD students (starting Spring or Fall 2024) with full tuition and stipend support (TA/RA), as well as ongoing intern opportunities with stipends. Applicants from computer science, mathematics, statistics, or EE backgrounds are encouraged. The labs have abundant funding and computing resources.

Application procedure: send a CV, transcript, and a brief self‑introduction with research interests to [email protected] (subject: "PhD/Intern Open Position {Your Name}"). Additional faculty provide separate contact emails and Google Forms links for interested candidates.

All candidates are welcome to apply, and the departments emphasize strong research passion, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the possibility of remote work or green‑card assistance for qualifying interns.