Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) has opened applications for the third edition of its Undergraduate Research Internship Programme (UGRIP). The competitive selection process identifies the top third- and fourth-year STEM undergraduate students from around the world to attend the month-long AI programme in Abu Dhabi, where they gain hands-on experience in AI research and work with some of the world’s leading AI researchers and faculty.
The month-long, all-expenses-paid internship programme will give third- and fourth-year STEM university students the opportunity to connect with some of the brightest minds in AI and gain hands-on experience of AI research in areas including computer vision (CV), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) at MBZUAI’s campus in Abu Dhabi over the summer of 2025. As a testament to the programme’s success in fostering academic advancement, more than 50% of participants from the inaugural edition of UGRIP have since joined MBZUAI as postgraduate students or researchers.
MBZUAI’s Provost, Professor Timothy Baldwin, said: “We’re excited to open applications for the third edition of UGRIP, which contributes to our mission to identify and nurture the next generation of innovators and leaders in AI. UGRIP has been highly successful over its first two editions, providing a stepping-stone for aspiring researchers from around the globe to achieve real-world impact through hands-on AI projects. We look forward to welcoming some of the world’s best STEM students to Abu Dhabi and giving them the opportunity to work closely with our top-class faculty and researchers.”
Since its inaugural edition, 79 students from universities including Harvard University, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Padova, IIT Madras, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Vietnam National University HCM City and Australian National University, joined the programme after a rigorous selection process.
Teams of UGRIP interns will work on upwards of 10 research projects that have been specially designed for the programme by MBZUAI faculty. Projects in 2024 included the development of a metaverse prototype for digital healthcare; an initiative to improve the accuracy and robustness of AI-powered baby cry analysis models, and a systematic evaluation of large language model generalizability across languages and tasks.
Some of the papers to come out of UGRIP’s research projects to date have been accepted to leading academic conferences including the International Conference on Medical Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) and the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing conference (EMNLP).
Undergraduates interested in internships with MBZUAI can submit their applications online by February 28, 2025 (5:00 PM UAE time) to be considered for UGRIP Summer 2025. The programme will run from June 9 until July 4.
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