Although the content of the blog can be generally applicable to all undergraduate students, I am mainly providing information targeting students studying computer science at Indian universities.
Often students with early exposure to research i.e., during their undergraduate studies look out for summer internships. Especially if you are new to research you might find it difficult to get to right information or contacts. In this blog post I would like to point out some places where you can look out for opportunities.
Research Internships are usually offered for doctoral, masters or bachelors third or final year students who would have already finished some core research courses. If you are interested in research in the first two years, you should work on building up a research profile.
- Complete specialized courses on online platforms like Coursera
- Attend summer schools or training programs in interested research area
- Choose courses wisely if your curriculum has an option of providing flexible courses
- Gain some hands on experience with atleast one or two programming languages
- Take guidance from your seniors or alumni who are doing graduate studies
For a research internship its always better to rely on area specific mailing lists.
For example if you are interested in NLP or computational linguistics,
Corpora list is the best place to look out for Conference notifications/Internships/Jobs/PhD positions in that area.
Look out for authors of recently published papers in top conferences of your area of interest and email them directly. Go through their university webpage before
emailing them to avoid disappointment (some of them have specific
requirements or might not be interested in taking interns).
You can always ask your current supervisors or professors to recommend you to their collaborators or contacts if any of them are looking for interns.
Links to conferences and mailing lists:
Early Research Pointers : Sheet1
Area | Mailing List | Well known conference |
---|---|---|
NLP, Computational Linguistics | Corpora List | ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, EACL |
Information Retrieval | SIGIR List | SIGIR, CIKM, ECIR, ICMR, WWW |
Computer Vision | ImageWorld | ICCV, CVPR, ECCV |
Human Computer Interaction | CHI Mailing lists | CHI, CSCW, UIST |
Speech Processing | Elsnet List | INTERSPEECH, ICASSP, SLT, ASRU |
Machine Learning | ML news | NIPS, ICML |
NLP, Data mining, ML | NLPpeople |
Popular Summer Internship/Summer schools
Summer Programs : Sheet1
Programs | host university/industory | area |
---|---|---|
JHU Summer Research Expedition | Johns Hopkins University | |
CERN Summer Program | CERN Openlab | |
INRIA Internship | INRIA, France | |
IIT Bombay Internship | IIT Bombay, India | |
ISI Kolkata Internship | Centre for Cryptology and Security, ISI Kolkata | Cryptology, Security |
CMU Summer Internship | CMU Robotics Institute | Robotics |
IISC Summer school | IISC, Bangalore | |
IIT Guwahati Internship | Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Guwahati | |
XRCE Internhsips | Xerox Research Centre Europe | Machine Learning, NLP, Vision |
LXMLS Summer School | Lisbon Machine Learning Summer school | Machine Learning, NLP |
QCRI Internship Program | Qatar Computing Research Institute | |
NSF Supported Summer Internships | Jelinek Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology (JSALT) | Speech Language Technology |
Computer Vision Internships | Perceiving Systems, Max Planck Institute (Germany) | Computer Vision |
Globalink Research Internship | Private funding to collaborate with any Canadian University | Applicable to different disciplines |
FBK Summer Internships | Fondazione Bruno Kessler | Link directs to NLP Internships or positions |
INSIGHT Galway, Summer Internships | INSIGHT Galway (Earlier known as DERI) | Linked data, NLP (internships, jobs & phd positions) |
Masters Programs
Apart from research internships if anyone is looking for fully-funded masters courses which allow you to spend time at different universities, have a look at below opportunities. Having an amazing experience as an Erasmus Mundus scholar, I highly recommend it. I cannot speak for all the courses but in general they are pretty good. Erasmus/EIT masters programs and scholarships are considered as very prestigious and often competitive to get full funding for non-European students.