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 (more...)

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 (more...)

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 (more...)

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 (more...)

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a crucial driver of much of the recent progress in vision and language modeling. In the SSL paradigm, a model is pre-trained through a pretext task that only involves unlabeled data—the pre-trained representation is then fine-tuned on downstream tasks of interest (more...)

Ahmed Alaa - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

In Self-supervised learning (SSL), a model is pre-trained through a pretext task that only involves unlabeled data—the pre-trained representation is then fine-tuned on downstream tasks of interest where only a small number of labeled examples may be available. In this project, we will explore novel (more...)

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- and few-shot performance of LLMs repurposed to issue predictions (more...)

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 (more...)

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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 language as well. The primary research will involve carrying out linguistic annotations (e.g., reading novels and marking (more...)

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

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

Many computational studies on people in text focus on gender. We are interested in broadening the dimensions of identity labels analyzed in natural language processing and cultural analytics. In particular, we hope to carefully curate resources and datasets for investigating the representation of race in fiction, especially in literature used (more...)

David Bamman - Professor, Information, School of

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

There are several research opportunities available for undergraduates for expanding BookNLP (https://github.com/booknlp/booknlp), a natural language processing pipeline for books and other long documents. We'll be focusing on developing BookNLP for Python, and expanding its capacity to the languages of Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and German. This work will (more...)

Gasper Begus - Professor, Linguistics

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

This project models 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 (more...)

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 (more...)

Matteo Benetton - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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 (more...)

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 (more...)

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off 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 (more...)

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 a significant portion of people suffering from these disorders. Nevertheless, many patients do not respond adequately or cannot tolerate the (more...)

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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 (more...)

Joshua Blumenstock - Professor, Information, School of

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

Access to credit can be an important lifeline, but it can also lock people into debt traps. Mobile banking technologies have completely transformed the ways in which people, especially in the developing world, access credit, raising new questions about fairness and welfare in lending. The goal of this project is (more...)

Joshua Blumenstock - Professor, Information, School of

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

Over the past decade, the rapid proliferation of mobile phones, satellites, and other digital sensors has created tremendous opportunities to measure human behavior. These data also provide the foundation for the growing interdisciplinary field of computational social science. Non-traditional “big” data hold unique potential in developing and conflict-affected (more...)

Joshua Blumenstock - Professor, Information, School of

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

The Data-Intensive Development Lab at UC Berkeley (didl.berkeley.edu) is providing data science support to the governments of several Low and Middle Income Countries, as well as humanitarian organizations like GiveDirectly, who are doing their best to effectively respond to the evolving humanitarian crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (more...)

Joshua Blumenstock - Professor, Information, School of

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

Sustainable sand mining is one of the most pressing ecological challenges currently facing the planet. After water, sand is the world’s most valuable natural resource – over 50 billion tons of construction-grade sand and gravel were mined globally from rivers and beaches in 2021, accounting for 85% of all mineral (more...)

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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 (more...)

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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 (more...)

Tianna Bruno - Professor, Geography

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     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 (more...)

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 (more...)

Iain Carmichael - Professor, Statistics

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

UC Berkeley and UCSF are beginning a new collaboration on several large scale machine learning projects for medical imaging 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 (more...)

Iain Carmichael - Professor, Statistics

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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 (more...)

Irene Chen - Professor, Computational Precision Health

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

This project will investigate the presence of biases in large language models (LLMs) designed for clinical applications (more...)

Irene Chen - Professor, Computational Precision Health

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

This project involves leveraging AI techniques to model and predict health outcomes resulting from extreme weather events due to climate change (more...)

Irene Chen - Professor, Computational Precision Health

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

This project involves analyzing clinical data to better understand diabetes progression patterns and equity in diagnostic testing and treatment decisions (more...)

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 (more...)

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 (more...)

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 on economics of AI. The research uses unique measure of firm-level investments in AI and other emerging technologies, derived from individual employees’ resumes. The research answers key questions such as: Do new technologies such as AI benefit firms? What happens to the (more...)

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 (more...)

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 (more...)

Massimiliano Fratoni - Professor, Nuclear Engineering

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 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 (more...)

Heather Haveman - Professor, Sociology, Sociology

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

The tech sector has a gender problem. Women are underrepresented in engineering and management jobs. Journalists and industry veterans have documented the bro culture that pervades tech and leads to discrimination and harassment. With 2 PhD students, I am analyzing gender inequality in the tech sector in 2 separate (but (more...)

Heather Haveman - Professor, Sociology, Sociology

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

My research team is analyzing employee reviews from Glassdoor.com to understand what topics or themes are most salient to employees. In other words, we want to know what employees say when they describe their jobs and workplaces. Although there has been a lot of research on a few topics that (more...)

Julian Hong - Professor, UC San Francisco

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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 (more...)

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 (more...)

Ming Hsu - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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 (more...)

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 (more...)

Ming Hsu - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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 (more...)

Drew Jacoby-Senghor - Professor, Business, Haas School

Status: Current Term Now Closed     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 (more...)

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 (more...)

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 (more...)

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 (more...)

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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 (more...)

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     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. If you enjoy sharing natural history news and research as well as connecting people in our community and the public, this is the apprenticeship for you (more...)