URAP

Dor Abrahamson - Professor, Education

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

We present an innovative educational design for basic arithmetic that responds to students’ documented difficulties with adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers. The design utilizes MOVES, a technological architecture that combines floor- and screen-projected interactive interfaces. Students enact arithmetic operations, e.g., “3 - (-2)” by walking along a projected...

Dor Abrahamson - Professor, Education

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

What do dancing and geometrical proof have in common? Turns out that in both of these disparate practices, we imagine lines to solve the common problem of perceptually engaging the environment to perform sensorimotor tasks. In dance, these lines have been called “attentional anchors.” In geometry, these lines are called...

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Description: Squishy robots are rapidly deployable mobile sensing robots for disaster rescue, remote monitoring and space exploration. Our emergent technologies are at the fusion of robotics, mobile sensing, machine learning, big data fusion and smart IoT (Internet of Things). Our first target market is the HazMat and CBRNE (Chemical, biological...

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Squishy robots are rapidly deployable mobile sensing robots for disaster rescue, remote monitoring and space exploration. Our emergent technologies are at the fusion of robotics, mobile sensing, machine learning, big data fusion and smart IoT (Internet of Things). This semester we will focus on smart sensor robots for early detection...

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Project #1. theDesignExchange.org: (1) theDesignExchange: We are in the process of designing and developing the DesignExchange, an interactive web portal for the design and design strategy community. The DesignExchange aims to meet three needs: consolidate and organize the many design and design research methods used, develop a community of practitioners...

Alice Agogino - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

This research project originated from a longstanding relationship between the Pinoleville Pomo Nation from Northern California and an interdisciplinary research group from UC Berkeley. After conversations with the Tribal Council and researchers’ participation in tribal gatherings, issues around well-being, and education were identified as areas of common interest. One...

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...

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

We are looking for motivated students who want to develop their experimental, theoretical, and computational analysis abilities. The goal of this research is to discover new theories that will be applied to ocean wave energy converter and off-shore structures. You will have the opportunity to design and conduct scientific...

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Ships spend $45B/year extra fuel because of encountering ocean waves en route, which translates to 1% of the world’s total Green House Gas (GHG) emission. If waves that a ship will encounter can be predicted, then through a smart routing algorithm a significant (>20%) improvement in the performance...

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

We have a few experimental research projects in the area of fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, aerospace engineering, and ocean engineering. These are serious research projects that potentially can be done by undergraduate students. By serious it means that there is a potential for publication or presenting your results in national and...

Reza Alam - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

Two positions available: 1) Design and fabrication, 2) Modeling and Controller Design Field Oriented Control (FOC) is an advanced commutation and current control technique that allows Brushless DC (BLDC) motors to run more efficiently, with a higher power factor, with smoother motion (less torque ripple), and with no compromise in...

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...

Jeff Belkora - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

STUDENT TESTIMONIALS “This apprenticeship has been the highlight of my time at Berkeley. It has given me a chance to help patients in difficult medical situations, and as a pre-health undergraduate, this is important to me.” “It is a great opportunity to get clinical experience and work with like...

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...

William Boos - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

The North American monsoon is a band of intense rainfall that stretches more than 1,000 km along Mexico's west coast and into the southwestern US, delivering crucial water supply to the semi-arid regions of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. This monsoon is a continental-scale atmospheric circulation that driven...

William Boos - Professor, Earth and Planetary Science

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

This project will use satellite data and a new network of hundreds of on-the-ground instrument stations to generate a risk dataset for farmers in equatorial Africa. Our research group studies the fluid dynamics of Earth's tropical atmosphere, focusing on the atmospheric waves and vortices that produce extreme rainfall...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

In this project, we aim to achieve decentralized multi-vehicle collaborative navigation in an unsignalized intersection scenario. We will utilize an existing (custom) simulation environment to collect data. The data come from the optimal solution of the centralized optimal control problem or the nash equilibrium solution of the potential game...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

In order to mitigate risk during deployment, control algorithms for robots on extraterrestrial missions (such as the NASA JPL Artemis rover) must first be evaluated in high-fidelity dynamic simulators. These simulators must accurately model the robot dynamics within a complex, changing environment. The goal of this project is for...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

This project involves working with an existing 1/10-scale autonomous vehicle platform to explore and operate in unknown and changing environments, including on sandy beaches or gravel. To optimize the vehicle for its environment, it is of interest to consider platform modularity and in-the-field morphability. The goal is...

Francesco Borrelli - Professor, Mechanical Engineering

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

This project involves building 10-20 vehicles of the 1/10-scale Berkeley Autonomous Race Car (BARC) platform. The platform is used for demonstrating novel control algorithms and to support the vehicle dynamics course. The goal is to also document the design and construction of the platform. Students will work at the...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

RNA-seq has been widely used in biological and medical research because of its capability to quantify transcriptome changes. Researchers usually use their impressions and experience to choose whether to analyze transcriptome changes in gene expression or alternative splicing levels. A more systematic way to determine whether to focus on...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

Genome sequencing identifies a vast number of genetic variants. Predicting these variants’ molecular and clinical effects is one of the preeminent challenges in genetics. Accurate prediction of the impact of genetic variants improves our understanding of how genetic information yields molecular and cellular functions and is an essential step toward...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

Proteins often fold into compact structural units, called domains. Protein domains are basic units of protein function and evolution. Delineating domain boundaries is a prerequisite for further analyses of protein structures. However, this process is largely a manual process and the accuracy of these computer programs is still not satisfactory...

Steven Brenner - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

The field of genome interpretation is essential for our understanding of human biology and the advancement of personalized medicine. However, the rapid accumulation of genomic data far exceeds our capacity for reliable interpretation. Consequently, the majority of variation discovered by next generation sequencing technologies is of unknown significance. These variants...

Jennifer Bussell - Professor, Political Science, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

This project will evaluate the relationship between the responsiveness of politicians to individual requests for assistance and their future political performance. Specifically, we will merge previously collected experimental data on the response, or lack thereof, of politicians in India to requests for help accessing government services, with subsequent data on...

Jennifer Bussell - Professor, Political Science, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

This project examines the character of global clothing production and (re)use. At this stage of the project we will be collecting descriptive qualitative and quantitative data on (1) the political economy of clothing production and distribution, with an emphasis on fast fashion; (2) patterns of secondhand clothing trade, (3...

Jennifer Bussell - Professor, Political Science, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

This project seeks to understand the dynamics of the textiles industry in India, with special attention to the political economy of production. In this stage of the research, we will be focused on collecting background materials about the industry, including statistics on both small-and large-scale production, documentation of...

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Our group studies heart rhythm disorders, such as ventricular tachycardia or atrial fibrillation, using computer simulations and imaging. Heart rhythm disorders are associated with abnormal electrophysiological excitation wave phenomena in the heart muscle, which can take on complex pattern-forming and self-organizational spatio-temporal dynamics. The excitation triggers intracellular...

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Our group develops computational and experimental methods for the imaging of intact, isolated hearts ex vivo. We produce 3D imaging data using fluorescence and ultrasound imaging, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07943, and we combine this data to obtain high-resolution visualizations of beating hearts and heart rhythm disorders...

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Are you a computer vision enthusiast and are you interested in applying your skills in biological research? Our group develops computational and experimental methods for the imaging of the heart and heart rhythm disorders. We have developed a novel panoramic high-speed fluorescence imaging setup for the imaging of the...

Jan Christoph - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

Our group studies the heart from a complex biological system's perspective und we use computer simulations to study cardiac dynamics during disease and development. In the heart, electrical excitation propagates from cell to cell through ion channels and triggers mechanical contraction and deformation in each cell. This leads to waves...

Michael F. Crommie - Professor, Physics

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

The electrical conductance of 2D materials strongly depends on the presence of atomic defects and so understanding how defects scatter electrons is crucial for engineering the properties of 2D devices. Up to now, most studies of the influence of defects on device behavior have focused solely on transport measurements where...

Michael F. Crommie - Professor, Physics

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

Moiré materials are a class of materials prepared by twisting two atomic materials on top of each other. These classes of materials have become a preferred platform for studying correlated phases due to their tunability of correlation through the moiré period. For example, non-conventional superconductivity, correlated insulating states, quantum...

Michael F. Crommie - Professor, Physics

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

Air sensitive transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) is a class of material hosting interesting quantum phenomena, such as quantum spin liquid, Mott insulator, quantum spin hall insulator etc. To reach different quantum phases of materials, one important tuning parameter is the carrier concentrations inside the material which can be controlled by...

Ronald Fearing - Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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

We are looking for students interested in robot design, fabrication, and testing of pouch-based robots, for applications in minimally invasive surgery and beyond. Current surgical tools cannot navigate tortuous anatomical corridors, and as a result, accessing certain locations requires extensive tissue removal, general anesthesia, and a full operating room...

Emma Fraser - Professor, New Media, Center for

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

OSKI Tech is a program that introduces new technology to a range of students. It is designed to work as a portable technology instruction lab, with a focus on expanding participation in technology for students in media studies, new media, arts and social sciences. The core of OSKI Tech is...

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...

Liz Galvez - Professor, Architecture

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

American desert cities designed and built at the turn of the century, in collaboration with the advent of air-conditioning technologies, have been able to house millions of Americans by relying primarily on fossil-fuels to supply relief from extreme hot weather. The Phoenix Metro Area, or The Valley of...

Liz Galvez - Professor, Architecture

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

To address the phenomenon of extreme weather conditions in relationship with the increase in energy instability, I have tested a series of experimental ideas for managing interior environments through pavilions, installations, exhibitions and essays. These tests put forth architectures that engage environmental management through design tactics and with reduced reliance...

Paul Gertler - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Project 1: Hard and Soft Entrepreneurship Skills for youth in Uganda, Two RCTs *** We study the medium and long term impacts (4y and 9y) of two exciting youth entrepreneurship programs. and innovative youth skill-development and entrepreneurship interventions 1. Skills for Effective Entrepreneurship Development, SEED; 2. The Educate! Experience The...

Paul Gertler - Professor, Business, Haas School

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

Join a cutting-edge research project investigating the complex relationship between drug cartel violence and labor market outcomes in Mexico. This study explores the unintended consequences of a major initiative by the Mexican government to combat organized crime by targeting cartel leadership. Between 2007 and 2014, more than 164,000 civilians...

Roland Henry - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

The ability to quantitatively measure changes to the central nervous system is approaching a crucial milestone for neuro-imaging - the ability to measure change on an individual patient level. The Multiple Sclerosis Center at UCSF, in concert with our partners, has prioritized the development of a panoply of neuro-imaging...