URAP

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: Off Campus

Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance in many tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing. Interpreting deep networks is essential for applying them to scientific applications such as healthcare. Two prominent approaches to interpret neural networks are saliency methods and network compression. However, both methods...

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: Off Campus

Characterizing the the neural function in the brain and its relationship with connectivity is an eminent question of visual sensory processing. With the recent increase in the amount of the data collected from brain, tools based on machine learning principles play an essential role in understanding the brain function. The...

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: Off Campus

Computational tools based on machine learning principles have shown promising results in analyzing medical images. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are one of the most successful tools in this domain. While most of the algorithms based on CNNs are supervised and with the increasing amount of un-labeled datasets, it...

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: Off Campus

There is an immense amount of unstructured and uncollated data in neuroscience and bioinformatics that could be used to guide knowledge discovery. Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in extracting and analyzing unstructured natural language corpora and are promising for semi-automated processing of text into scientific knowledge such...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Conformal prediction (CP) is a model-agnostic and distribution-free method for quantifying uncertainty in black-box machine learning (ML) models. CP can be used to construct prediction sets/intervals that covers the true labels with a pre-determined probability as long as the training and testing data are exchangeable...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Vision-Language Models (VLM) can support clinicians by analyzing medical images and engaging in natural language interactions to assist in diagnostic and treatment tasks. However, VLMs often exhibit "hallucinogenic" behavior, generating textual outputs not grounded in contextual multimodal information. This challenge is particularly pronounced in the medical domain, where we...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on large corpora of text have demonstrated incredible capabilities across with zero- or few-shot performance in new tasks that differ from their pre-training objectives. In this projects, we will study the zero-shot performance of LLMs for various clinical tasks using real...

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Institutional constraints and concerns over patient privacy impedes sharing of clinical data among researchers. High-fidelity synthetic data that mimics the real data distribution without revealing real data for individual patients can help empower and democratize research applying machine learning models to clinical problems. In this project, we will use...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

LitBank an annotated dataset of fiction to support tasks in natural language processing and the computational humanities. While it currently exists for English, we'll be branching out to create similar resources for other languages as well (including Spanish, Japanese, German and other languages). The primary research will involve carrying out...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Variationist sociolinguistics studies style, and the social meaning that is embedded in it. Though within sociolinguistics this most often takes the form of linguistic variables, style manifests in other aspects of our cultural lives. Here, we study another setting in which style manifests: the design of websites. This project seeks...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Methods in computer vision have reached a level of maturity that we can now develop computational instruments to measure a wide range of phenomena in film -- which actors are present in frame, the poses they have with respect to each other, the boundaries between shots -- which opens the door to...

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

This URAP position is a placeholder for mentorship of a project of your design. If you are an advanced student in CS, data science, or another discipline with a strong computational background and have a topic of interest in the space of cultural analytics or computational social science, feel free...

Gasper Begus - Professor, Linguistics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

This project looks at language in deep neural networks, animals (whales, elephants, spiders), and humans. We model spoken language from raw audio using deep generative neural networks (GANs). We use audio, neural, and behavioral data in spoken language to better understand and interpret deep learning models...

Matteo Benetton - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

In this project we plan to study the effect of financial influencers on asset markets. We will identify influencers in popular general platforms (e.g., twitter, instagram) and platform more specific for investments (e.g., StockTwits). We plan to study for both stocks and cryptocurrencies trading activities and return performances of retail...

Matteo Benetton - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The project is part of a large agenda trying to understand how banks compete in an evolving environment affected by changing demographics and the entry non fintech lenders and bigtech firms. One project is studying the heterogeneous preferences of borrowers and savers to explain the lengthening of the financial intermediation...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Rapid Reviews\Infectious Diseases (RR\ID) [rrid.mitpress.mit.edu], is an initiative of the MIT Press and the University of California, Berkeley. It is an open access, rapid-review overlay journal for the accelerated curation and peer review of COVID-19 and emerging infections disease-related research. RR\ID takes a transdisciplinary...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Rapid Reviews\Infectious Diseases (RR\ID) [rrid.mitpress.mit.edu], is an initiative of the MIT Press and the University of California, Berkeley. It is an open access, rapid-review overlay journal for the accelerated curation and peer review of COVID-19 and emerging infections disease-related research. RR\ID takes a transdisciplinary...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Psychiatric disorders including PTSD; and alcohol use disorder and other addictions are responsible for a large portion of both the global burden and US burden of disease. Current therapies help some people suffering from these disorders. Nevertheless, many patients do not respond adequately or cannot tolerate the side-effects accompanying...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The last few decades have seen growing acknowledgement and emphasis on the need to bridge gaps between research and practice. Implementation Science (IS) is the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and other evidence-based practices into routine practice. An evolving and interdisciplinary field...

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Become familiar with the mathematical, statistical, and computational tools used in the group and learn how to apply these methods to answer questions in ecological research and conservation decision making. Emphasis on the use of deep reinforcement learning and best practices in data science software development...

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Develop, test, and visualize methods for forecasting ecological variables such as carbon flux, beetle abundance, or indicators of aquatic ecosystem health...

Tianna Bruno - Professor, Geography

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

In this project, undergraduate student researchers will focus on one or two of the following aspects of a broader digital humanities project: 1) archival analysis of historical records related to 'environmental burdens' in an environmental justice community. Students will work to chart a history of the country's largest refinery and...

Tianna Bruno - Professor, Geography

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Students will assist in the creation of a digital humanities project on Black geographies and environmental justice. Over the past four years, I have collaborated with community organizations and community members to collect oral histories focused on Black history, environmental relationships, and connections to place in Port Arthur, Texas, a...

Atul Butte - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

LLMs have demonstrated tremendous potential in various domains, including healthcare. However, evaluating their outputs, especially in clinical settings, presents unique challenges. This project will compare the evaluation metrics obtained from automated methods for assessing free-text outputs generated by LLMs with the assessments from expert clinical judgment. The findings will...

Iain Carmichael - Professor, Statistics

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Work with UCSF on large scale machine learning projects for medical imaging and text processing in Pathology. The ultimate aim of this collaboration is to develop clinically impactful deep learning algorithms for disease diagnosis/prognosis using massive (e.g. 100,000x100,000 pixel) whole slide images (https://www.pixelscientia.com/article-finding-prognostic-patterns-in...

Iain Carmichael - Professor, Statistics

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

There is an expanding effort to improve patient care and accelerate biomedical research through the development of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that analyze high-resolution images of cancerous tissue biopsies. As in all AI applications, data is the critical ingredient; our ability to develop clinically deployable algorithms is dependent on...

Brian DeLay - Professor, History

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Guns and power go together. Like today, most forms of inequality in the global 19th century depended on a weapons gap. The unequal distribution of firearms helped determine power relations both between countries and within countries. Where did all those guns come from? And why did some have so many...

Brian DeLay - Professor, History

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Are you interested in history? Intrigued by the secrets locked away in old, handwritten letters? Do you want to help create new knowledge about the past through archival research? Or put technical skills to work understanding the past? If so, here’s your chance. Brian DeLay (Professor of History) and Julia...

Charles B. Faulhaber - Professor, Spanish and Portuguese

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Conversion of the PhiloBiblon relational database of ca. 420,000 records to the netgraph architecture of FactGrid: a database for historians. The software used is Wikibase, the same software used for Wikipedia. PhiloBiblon is a database of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan primary sources (manuscripts and early printed books) of medieval...

Anastassia Fedyk - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

This is an opportunity to work with a large dataset of over 400 million employment profiles (resumes) in order to understand global employment dynamics and firm performance. In this project, we will leverage techniques from big data and machine learning to structure and analyze large textual data, which can help...

Anastassia Fedyk - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project supports Professor Anastassia Fedyk’s research and policy work with web development and graphic design. The project involves maintaining and improving policy-related web resources such as Econ4UA.org, as well as designing and running experimental RCTs and surveys (sometimes involving new websites, sometimes executing simple Qualtrics surveys). Finally, the...

Anastassia Fedyk - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project assists in Professor Fedyk's more practical research, including not only her research papers but also frequent media interviews and the op-eds she writes for outlets such as Washington Post and LA Times. Example topics covered in this project include: Macroeconomic policies in the US and abroad; Measuring...

Anastassia Fedyk - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project focuses on data: hand-collecting new data, improving existing data, and structuring large messy data. Today, very large data sets are often at the heart of many social science research questions. However, those data sets can be plagued by big data problems: missing data, bad data, duplicate data...

Massimiliano Fratoni - Professor, Nuclear Engineering

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Pebble bed reactors (PBRs) use small spherical fuel elements that are piled in a cylindric core to achieve critical mass and energy production. The pebbles are circulated in and out of the core until the inner fuel is exhausted and at that point they are replaced with new pebbles. Such...

Heather Haveman - Professor, Sociology, Sociology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

I am analyzing employee descriptions (reviews) of their firms from Glassdoor.com in two different projects. 1) Gendered discourse We are measuring the gender slant of employing organizations’ conceptions of what work means, who workers are, and who has power. Such gendered conceptions can erect barriers to equality by framing ideal...

Julian Hong - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

The Hong lab is part of the UCSF Department of Radiation Oncology and Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute. We focus on combining clinical domain knowledge with data science to generate insights from real world data, develop actionable computational tools, and evaluate the benefit of these advances for personalized cancer care...

Ming Hsu - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Our lab is interested in how the brain computes and represents values that allow us to make decisions. These decisions range from the mundane and everyday, such as what to have for lunch, to truly momentous ones such as deciding on where to attend college. This project, and others in...

Ming Hsu - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

As a fast growing branch of artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP) has made it possible to uncover subtle patterns and hidden trends in large-scale real-world text data. It offers researchers and practitioners powerful tools to efficiently derive novel insights and predictions that are otherwise expensive or even...

Ming Hsu - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

We are looking for 1-2 student trainees who are interested in understanding the effects of early-life adversity/stress on economic and financial decision-making.  Despite the well-documented fact of the impact of early-life adversity on life-outcomes, researchers and policymakers know much less about the specific...

Ming Hsu - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

This project will apply neuroscientific tools and insights to address a problem that has bedeviled businesses, legal scholars, and policymakers—how to more objectively determine whether a work of art is “based on plagiarism” or is “obscene”. In music copyright, for example, a key question is whether two works are...

Drew Jacoby-Senghor - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

We explore how motivated and cognitive biases lead people to support inequality, even when it's not in their best interest to do so...

Drew Jacoby-Senghor - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

For this lab study, we are examining moral decision-making within group contexts. Specifically, we are exploring how moral decisions are discussed and made in groups...

Drew Jacoby-Senghor - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Some topics under investigation: - Do perceptions of hiring criterion vary based on preference to maintain the status quo? - Exploring the pitfalls of the hiring process and attempts to increase diversity - Why do supervisors assign more diversity related tasks to racial minority and woman employees? What psychological cost does this have...

Yehuda Kalay - Professor, Architecture

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

The performance of healthcare facilities is an important issue due to the high value of the services they provide on one hand, and the high cost of constructing and operating them on the other. Various disciplines have offered measures to assess such performance, focusing on different indicators. The healthcare industry...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

The term "AI" or "artificial intelligence" is now regularly splashed across news articles and op-eds; most people have some, if vague, idea of what AI means. But the term today does not mean what it used to mean: in the last two decades, the crop of technologies we now...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

For many ordinary people, the term "Cambridge Analytica"--even if they are not sure exactly what the controversy is about--brings forth some association with the topics of election interference, psychological manipulation, illicit hacking, Russian disinformation, and Facebook, even though it has very little do with any of these except...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     

Political scientists have noticed a large contemporary trend in the US where high-income college-educated people tend to vote Democratic rather than Republican, a reversal of earlier patterns; they have labeled this as "education polarization". Education polarization is best illustrated through the case of Prop 22 in California. In...

Shreeharsh Kelkar - Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Field (ISF)

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

In October 2012, the Harvard Business Review declared “data scientist” to be the “sexiest job of the 21st century.” Part of a "Spotlight package" on the power of "big data" and its potential to change organizations and management, the articles in the issue collectively argued that with the growth of...

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The world's natural history museums are responsible for documenting over 1.8 billion species known as a result of 300 years of biological exploration of the planet. The information contained in museums include observational and specimen-based data, text, images, sound and video and form the foundation of what we know...

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) is a vibrant research and informatics center for the campus and the natural history communities around the world. The world's natural history museums are responsible for documenting over 1.8 billion species known as a result of 300 years of biological exploration of the planet...