Prospective Students

I receive many emails from prospective students, and many of them are generic messages sent to hundreds of academics at once. I cannot answer them all. Please read this page before writing to me. If you still have questions afterwards, you are welcome to email me.

Start your email with this sentence: “I have read the instructions at gustavobatista.com/prospective-students.” Emails without it will probably not get an answer.

PhD and MPhil

I supervise PhD and MPhil candidates in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney. My main research topics are:

• quantification (estimating class prevalence) and learning under distribution shift, such as label shift and concept drift;
• time series classification and data stream mining;
• machine learning for IoT, network traffic and cybersecurity;
• machine learning on resource-constrained hardware, for example insect sensors and small satellites.

Before you contact me, please:

1. Check that our interests overlap. Read some of my recent publications and tell me which one relates to what you want to do, and why. I only consider candidates whose research plans fit my group.
2. Check that you meet UNSW’s entry requirements. These include a research component in your previous degree (for example, a thesis or publications) and English language requirements. Details are on UNSW’s Higher Degree Research admission pages.
3. Think about funding. Most of our candidates hold a scholarship, and scholarships at UNSW are competitive. Strong applications usually have excellent grades and research experience, ideally a publication. I don’t have funding to offer outside the advertised scholarships listed below.

If your plans fit, send me one email with:

• a short paragraph on the problem you want to work on and how it connects to my work;
• your CV, including publications;
• your academic transcripts, with grades;
• how you plan to fund your PhD (for example, UNSW scholarship rounds, a scholarship from your home country, or an employer).

Please don’t send a generic message, and please don’t send the same message several times. I read every email that follows these instructions, but I may take a while to reply when I am busy.

Advertised scholarships

When I have funded projects, I list them here. Please read the eligibility rules for each one (for example, some are only open to Australian citizens and permanent residents) before you apply.

Fully funded UNSW Scientia PhD Scholarship: Multimodal AI for Political Communication

Computational Methods to Study Polarisation in Australia and Chile

Can AI understand a political video? Politicians increasingly reach voters through short, emotionally charged clips, yet most research tools were built for text. The PhD candidate will develop multimodal AI methods that integrate images, sound, speech and platform metadata to detect how political videos build identities, stir emotions, cast opponents as enemies and mobilise audiences.

A central challenge is generalisation: will models trained on Australian content still work in Chile, with its different language, party system and media culture? Automated measures will be validated against human coding to ensure results are accurate, interpretable and meaningful.

Supervisory team. An interdisciplinary media and computer science team:

• Dr Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos (lead), School of the Arts & Media, UNSW
• A/Prof Gustavo Batista, School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW
• Dr Javier J. Amores, School of Communications, PUC Chile
• A/Prof Magdalena Saldaña, School of Communications, PUC Chile

International mobility. The project is designed as a cotutelle with PUC Chile (subject to final approval) or a research visit to PUC Chile, including a one-off mobility grant of up to $25,000 for a research placement in Santiago, Chile.

Who we are looking for

• Domestic applicants only (Australian citizens or permanent residents).
• A background in communication, political science, data science, computer science or computational social science, with curiosity about both code and meaning, and a genuine interest in democracy.
• Data science skills are highly desirable.
• Ideally, a publication in a high-ranked journal (or one in progress), and Spanish, Portuguese or Italian, as data will be collected in Spanish and English.

How to apply. Applications open soon. Interested candidates are welcome to get in touch for an informal chat before applying (you don’t need the sentence above for this scholarship): Dr Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos (mathias.felipe(AT)unsw.edu.au) or me (g.batista(AT)unsw.edu.au).

Masters and undergraduate students at UNSW

If you are already enrolled at UNSW and want to do a thesis or research project with me (for example, Honours, a Masters project or a research internship), email me directly with your transcript and the topic you are interested in. You don’t need to include the sentence above.

Internships and visits

I sometimes host visiting PhD students and researchers who bring their own funding, for example from their home university or a national funding agency. I cannot offer paid internships. If this applies to you, explain what you would like to do during the visit, how long you would stay and how it would be funded.