CISE Graduate Blog

  Minimum TOEFL Scores Update for ITAs Plus SPEAK Test, EAP 5836, and Intensive English Reminders Date distributed: March 12, 2026 Distributed to: All Graduate Deans, Associate Deans, School Directors, Department Chairs, Coordinators, and Staff TOEFL Band Scores for International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) This January, ETS (Educational Testing Service) stopped reporting sub-scores for the old TOEFL iBT. Now it is only reporting section band scores based on the new TOEFL scores. With the approval of the UF Graduate Council, the University of Florid has adopted these minimum band scores for ITAs with a teach...

Dr. Asadi 's group at the University of Florida is seeking a motivated PhD student to join our team working at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and semiconductor device inspection. Our research focuses on developing AI-driven solutions for physical inspection, failure analysis, and reliability assessment of semiconductor devices and advanced packaging technologies. We apply modern Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Generative AI techniques to analyze multimodal inspection data and enable intelligent decision-making in semiconductor manufacturing. Research Areas: • Machine Learning and Deep Learning for semiconductor inspection • Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for multimodal inspection data analysis • Large Language Models (LLMs) for engineering reasoning and knowledge systems • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for technical knowledge integration • Generative AI for inspection and analysis workflows • AI-driven analysis of X-ray CT, microscopy, and op...

We’re excited to invite everyone to AWM’s events on week of 3/23: On Monday, March 23rd,  we will have our third general body meeting (GBM #3)  at 4:00 P.M. in Little Hall 225. This event will be a summer and fall registration social. This is a great opportunity to ask for advice from other mathematics and statistics students, get course recommendations, and plan out your summer or fall schedule. Also, shirts will be available for purchase at the GBM. Cash is preferred if you can. Hope to see you there!  On Wednesday, March 25th, we will host our second faculty talk  of the semester at 4:00 P.M. in Little Hall 225. Dr. Kiley Graim  from the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering will give a talk titled "Disentangling population and disease signals with equitable genomic AI"  — the abstract and flyer are attached below. Everyone is welcome, and we hope to see you there!    Abstract : Rapid advancements i...

Prof. Asadi’s lab is currently looking to hire multiple OPS students with strong coding skills and a solid foundation in AI. If possible, could you please share this opportunity with CISE department undergrad/master's students. Students can apply and provide their details using the following Google Form (UF ID sign-in required): https://forms.gle/d41b3aLDVSRQLJR29 Thank you, and please let me know if you have any questions. Best regards, Pratyush Shukla PhD Student, Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Florida

The Computing for Social Good Lab has launched a “hack it if you can” challenge for our voting system. The goal is to get our technology to flip votes, undetected. Specifically, can the system be hacked to change votes such that it cannot be detected. We are going to offer $800 to the first team or individual that is successful, $500 to the 2nd team/individual and $200 to the 3rd team/individual or all teams are entered for the 3rd place lottery, assuming there’s a team or individual that can hack it. If no one can hack it, we will have the lottery.  It’s open to undergrads, MS, PhD students and anyone willing to try to hack our voting system. We will give each team/individual access to our voting system in one of the labs for 3 days. They will have exclusive access. At the end of the 3rd day, they will have to show evidence of the hack or surrender the hack.  Here’s the link with the instructions:  https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fw...

 Paid Consulting Opportunity — LLM Production Engineer Needed AI startup seeking a graduate student or recent graduate with hands-on experience building with large language model APIs in a production environment. The Project: A validated AI prompt performs well in direct API testing but degrades when passed through a backend middleware layer. We need someone who can diagnose the failure and build a clean minimal production wrapper to preserve prompt integrity end to end. Two-week engagement to start with potential for long-term opportunity. Paid. NDA required before project details are shared. Florida-based preferred but open to remote for the right candidate. If interested, reply with a brief note on your relevant experience. No lengthy proposals needed — just tell us what you've built.  Contact: goodearthentllc@gmail.com