URAP

Reza Abbasi-Asl - Professor, Neuroscience

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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: Full- no new appr needed     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: Full- no new appr needed     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

Community health workers need to navigate guidelines to make healthcare decisions for patients. The goal of this project is to develop an LLM-based system to assist community health workers retrieve information for the patient hand using multiple international guidelines...

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

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

In this project, we'll be exploring the techniques that fiction uses to evoke a sense of suspense in readers and to represent suspense experienced by its characters, and measure the degree to which computational models are able to capture that degree of uncertainty in what is going to unfold in...

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...

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 infections disease-related research. RR\ID takes a transdisciplinary approach to discuss, curate...

Stefano M. Bertozzi - Professor, Public Health

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

In 2022, there were an estimated 1.2 million people living with HIV and 31,800 new HIV infections in the United States. The U.S. HIV epidemic disproportionately affects men who have sex with men and is defined by persistent racial/ethnic disparities. We have two ongoing projects evaluating access to HIV...

Joshua Blumenstock - Professor, Information, School of

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

At the Global Opportunity Lab (gol.berkeley.edu), we view the world’s most pressing policy challenges as opportunities to develop transformative policy solutions. Harnessing state-of-the-art data science, computation, and analytic tools, we generate insights and innovations that promote prosperity and expand opportunity across the globe. Our lab is currently...

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...

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...

Joshua Blumenstock - Professor, Information, School of

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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...

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...

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...

Carl Boettiger - Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management

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

Arid ecosystems such as the Mojave Desert are undergoing rapid shifts in climate and fire activity, with major implications for ecological resilience and species conservation. The Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment (DSE) is currently collaborating with the National Park Service to develop ecological models that simulate vegetation response...

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: Full- no new appr needed     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...

Brian DeLay - Professor, History

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

None of the revolutionaries who transformed the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could mass-produce their own guns and ammunition. They had to rely on the international arms trade. Aim at Empire is the first book to explore how access to weapons (or lack thereof) shaped...

Charles B. Faulhaber - Professor, Spanish and Portuguese

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 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 on technical projects involving ML/AI. The projects include: (i) working with a large dataset of over 400 million employment profiles (resumes) in order to understand global employment dynamics and firm performance by structuring and analyze the large textual data; (ii) building custom large...

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...

Dennis Feehan - Professor, Demography

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

Big historical datasets have set off an exciting wave of discoveries throughout the social sciences. These datasets have hundreds of millions of rows with rich information about historical populations, such as the complete set of responses to the 1940 US census and the record of all Social Security enrollments. They...

Heather Haveman - Professor, Sociology, Sociology

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

I am analyzing a longitudinal database of articles published in the Washington Post newspaper from 1977 to 2024. The primary goal is to understand how gender roles are portrayed in news media. To do this, we are using several natural-language-processing techniques. We are building a dictionary of gender...

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...

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: Full- no new appr needed     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

High-rise buildings pose unique fire-safety challenges due to high occupancy rate and difficult evacuation conditions. In 2023, San Francisco adopted a Fire Code amendment requiring full sprinkler retrofits in all residential high-rise buildings built before 1975, affecting 146 buildings, home to approximately 15,000 residents. While sprinklers are...

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. The truth is that it had very little to do with any...

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: Full- no new appr needed     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: 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...

Michelle Koo - Staff Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     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...

Jennifer Lewis - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

The plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae causes disease in a large number of different plant species, using the type III secretion system to secrete and translocate effector proteins into the plant. Many of these effector proteins are believed to function primarily in the suppression of host defense signaling. However recognition of...

Jennifer Lewis - Professor, Plant and Microbial Biology

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

The plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae causes disease in a large number of different plant species. Virulence is primarily achieved by the type III secretion system, which secretes and translocates effector proteins into the plant. Many of these effector proteins are believed to suppress host defense signaling. However recognition of these...

Rita Lucarelli - Professor, MELC (Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures)

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

Ancient Egyptian coffins are inscribed with spells and images which stand in for spells. All function together as a machine to resurrect the deceased and to guide them safely through the next world. Given this function, it is perhaps surprising that the texts from coffins are usually published completely divorced...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

There are a limited number of human omics datasets that include menopausal status information for female subjects and include enough premenopausal and postmenopausal women. For instance, multi-omics data has been generated for thousands of Framingham Heart Study (FHS) participants and hundreds of TwinsUK female twin pairs. We will compare...

Marisa Medina - Professor, UC San Francisco

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

A subset of women experience an accelerated rise in certain cardiometabolic risk factors around the time of menopause, increasing their risk for heart disease and other conditions. We would like to discover why some women experience dramatic changes while others are relatively protected...