UGRIP: Undergraduate Research Internship at MBZUAI

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NAZARBAYEV UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 28

UGRIP 2025

Damir Kim

4th-year Mathematics student

Moldir Azhimukhanbet

4th-year CS student

Artur Muratov

4th-year CS student

Today’s Talk

Overview of the UGRIP Program

Research in Natural Language Processing — Artur

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Research in Computer Architecture — Moldir

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Research in Computer Vision — Damir

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UGRIP Program

1.

UGRIP Program

1. Fully funded, four-week Research Internship at MBZUAI (Abu Dhabi).
2. In total 15 projects: CS, CV, ML, NLP, and Robotics etc.

Projects 2025

1. Brain Tumor Segmentation

2. FRaN-X: FRaming & Narratives-eXplorer

3. Automated End-To-End Media Bias Rating System

4. Certified Learning for Safe Obstacle Avoidance in Robotics

5. Enhancing Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Models through Chain-of-Thought Reasoning on Question Answering Tasks

6. ML System Optimization for Multi-Modal and Interactive Music Generation

7. Toward Role-Aware Large Language Models for Safe Organizational Deployment

8. Early Explorations on the Impact of Pruning and Low-Bit Quantization for LLM Reasoning Ability

9. Exploring Jailbreak Attack Transferability Between Speech Language Models

10. Rethinking Tokenization and Embedding in Language Models

11. Tokenization-free Machine Translation for Dialectal Arabic

12. Improving LLM performance for code-switching data: a new multitask benchmark and an investigation into cross-lingual alignment

13. Curriculum-learning for cross-lingual knowledge distillation

14. Asm-to-Asm Transpilation

15. Project Telepathy: Building an AI Professor X

Why UGRIP?

• To experience MBZUAI and Abu Dhabi.
• To have a publication.
• To boost your chances for a Master’s offer.
• To understand if research is for you.

+:

Many GPUs

Free coffee/tea

Single dorm rooms

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-:

Small medical center

Very hot in summer

30 min. from center

MBZUAI and Abu Dhabi

Application

• UGRIP 2025: 5 out 57 (9%) from NU.
• Will open on January 1, 2026 (Rolling admissions —> apply early).
• Minimum CGPA of 3.5 (on a 4.0 scale) —> high GPA is very important.
• Required documents (request before the end of Fall semester):
1. Publications/ Research Experience —> big advantage. Where? ISSAI
2. Official transcript (in application math & cs grades listed separately).
3. Letter from University registrar confirming English (instead of IELTS).
4. Statement of purpose essay (MBZUAI Tech Talks).

Once you are accepted:

• If you want to buy AED, do it in Astana.

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• Project Allocation:�
• You will be asked to choose Top 3 projects (at MBZUAI).
• Deallocation system tries to place everyone into one of their choices =>

Important tip: If there’s a highly selective project you really want, don’t put “unpopular” projects as #2 and #3, this can misplace you

(I made this mistake).

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• You will be evaluated.

CS/CA Research

2.

Background

Moldir Azhimukhanbet�Senior Year Computer Science Student

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• 3 pet projects (one with FPGA)�
• Competitive GPA
• Texer.AI - Hardware Design and Verification Engineer�

Asm-to-Asm Transpiler

Asm-to-Asm Transpiler

Asm-to-Asm Transpiler for o2 optimization level

Asm-to-Asm Transpiler for o2 optimization level

Asm-to-Asm Transpiler

Asm-to-Asm Transpiler

Asm-to-Asm Transpiler

Asm-to-Asm Transpiler

My Professor

CV Research

3.

Background

• 1 conference experience in India�
• RA at NUSOM, CAFI Lab�
• Internship @ISSAI, SRP 2024

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• 2-3 pet projects�
• 1 Coursera certificate�
• Competitive GPA (>3.5)�

Brain Tumor Segmentation, Generation, Classification

Three tasks from BraTS 2025 Lighthouse Challenge

� Task №11: Predicting the Tumor Response During Therapy� Task №8: MR Image Synthesis�

Task №5: Segmentation

…state-of-the art methods can be widely implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa given the extensive use of lower quality MRI technology, which produces poorer image contrast and resolution…

Segmentation, Generation, Classification Teams

Project Supervisor

Dr. Mohammad Yaqub�Associate Professor of Computer Vision

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• Сompleted his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2011

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• University lecturer at IT services, University of Oxford and a research fellow at the Nuffield department of clinical neurosciences (NDCN), University of Oxford

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• Founder of Labib AI, MBZUAI first startup

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• Founder of BioMedia Lab

Brain Tumor Segmentation Task

Brain Tumor Segmentation Task

Need to classify these:

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All we have: 60 annotated cases MRI scans from the dataset from Sub-Saharan Africa, gathered from Nigeria, possibly from the single hospital.

What did we use?

What did we use?

A lot of troubleshooting & training…

My first predictions:

Did we do well?

Results

Awards

Best Team Award

3rd Place in the Challenge

NLP Research

4.

Background

Artur Muratov�

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• 2 month RA at @ISSAI, (1 project)

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• Gen-AI project (3rd place at startup competition in Doha, Qatar; 3rd Place nFactorial Incubator Demo Day)

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• CGPA 3.92/4.00, ranking #1

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• 2nd place at Informatics&Physics at Phystech.International Olympiad (high school)

FRaN-X: Framing and Narratives-Explorer

• Goal: Detect how people, countries, or organizations are portrayed in news articles.
• Part of SemEval-2025 Task 10.

SemEval-2025 Task 10

SemEval-2025 Task 10

SemEval – What Is It?

The top global benchmark competition in NLP

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My Professor

Preslav Nakov

Department Chair and Professor of Natural Language Processing

Q&A

5.

mbzuai.ac.ae

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

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Thank you