MBZUAI's Undergraduate Research Internship Programme Sees Record Global Participation

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) has wrapped up the 2025 edition of its Undergraduate Research Internship Programme (UGRIP). This year marked the largest and most varied group yet, with 57 top undergraduate students from 24 nations participating. These students hailed from prestigious institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, and University of Maryland, College Park.

Held annually at MBZUAI's Abu Dhabi campus, UGRIP offers a fully funded, four-week residency. It provides final or penultimate-year undergraduates a chance to collaborate with esteemed faculty on advanced AI research projects. This year's projects covered areas such as machine learning, robotics, computer vision, natural language processing, and core computer science disciplines.

"UGRIP is a cornerstone of our mission to open up AI education and research to the brightest talent globally, regardless of background or geography," said Professor Timothy Baldwin, MBZUAI’s Provost and Professor of Natural Language Processing.

The 2025 programme saw an acceptance rate of just 4 percent. Nearly 2,000 applications were received from exceptional students worldwide, marking a 91 percent increase from the previous year. "As these numbers evidence, the very best undergraduate students from around the world are looking to engage in AI research and innovation and increasingly look to MBZUAI and Abu Dhabi as the destination of choice to achieve that ambition," Professor Baldwin noted.

Participants were chosen based on academic excellence, research potential, and a strong interest in AI. They came from STEM fields like computer science, mathematics, biotechnology, data science, software engineering, and computer engineering. The most represented countries included Egypt, the United States, Russia, India, and Kazakhstan.

Interns joined faculty-led teams working on impactful projects. These included developing models for brain tumour detection; creating systems for media bias detection; designing interactive music generation systems; translating dialectal Arabic; and building frameworks for brain-machine interfaces. These initiatives highlight MBZUAI's research scope and allow students to engage in original work collaboratively.

Applications for UGRIP 2026 will open in January next year. MBZUAI encourages undergraduate students in STEM-related fields with a CGPA of 3.5 or above (or equivalent), who are in their final or second-last year of study, to apply.

With inputs from WAM