PhD Hunt by Comet

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  Task instruction

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  Task Execution and result by comet

About the Project

This project was inspired by the difficulty many Indian master’s students face when searching for fully funded PhD positions in AI/LLMs. Opportunities are scattered across platforms, deadlines change constantly, and verifying whether positions are open to international applicants often requires manual effort. To solve this, I built an automated weekly pipeline that consolidates high-quality, verified PhD openings based on strict eligibility criteria.

What I Built

Using Comet-based automation, the system crawls multiple sources—LinkedIn, X.com, Reddit, and official university/lab websites—and filters opportunities using predefined rules:

• Fully funded PhD positions only (tuition waiver + stipend)
  
• Fields: LLMs, AI/ML, NLP, multimodal, safety, domain-specific LLMs
  
• Open to internationals/Indian applicants
  
• Posted within 30 days, deadlines within 90 days
  
• Verified from official or reputable sources
  

The pipeline extracts consistent structured fields such as university, lab, funding, deadlines, focus areas, requirements, and visa notes. Data is exported in two formats: (A) clean tables for easy review, and (B) a full JSON schema.

How I Built It

• Automated web data collection with scheduled weekly runs
  
• Rule-based filtering and validation
  
• Parsing text into structured fields using regex + LLM assistance
  
• Output formatting into tables and JSON schema
  

What I Learned

• Designing reliable automations for changing web content
  
• Building consistent schemas for unstructured academic postings
  
• Filtering academic opportunities with precise, reproducible criteria
  

Challenges

• Posts across platforms vary in format, making extraction non-trivial
  
• Ensuring only verified, official PhD openings are included
  
• Maintaining accuracy given frequent changes in deadlines and funding details
  

Overall, this project streamlines a time-consuming search process and provides actionable, structured insights for students seeking PhD positions in cutting-edge AI research.

Built With

• comet