Only 2% made it: MBZUAI attracts thousands in global race for AI research

More than 2,500 undergraduate students from around the world applied this summer for a place in a research internship at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), highlighting the growing global demand for hands-on AI research opportunities.

Only 54 students were selected for the university’s four-week Undergraduate Research Internship Programme, giving the programme an acceptance rate of around 2 per cent.

The successful applicants came from universities across 21 countries, including ETH Zurich, Nanyang Technological University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, KAIST, the University of Southern California and the University of Edinburgh.

Rather than working on classroom exercises, the students joined active research teams and contributed to projects already underway at the university.

Professor Dezhen Song, Vice Provost for Student and Postdoctoral Affairs and Professor of Robotics at MBZUAI, said more students are seeking research experience before starting postgraduate studies.

“More undergraduate students want to be involved in serious research much earlier in their education,” he said. “They want the opportunity to contribute to important projects, understand how research is carried out and work with teams across different disciplines.”

He added that artificial intelligence is increasingly bringing together fields such as medicine, biology, robotics and engineering, making collaboration across disciplines more important than ever.

This year’s interns worked on a wide range of projects, including AI systems that analyse ovarian cancer images, humanoid robot movement, medical assistants designed around regional healthcare guidelines, deepfake detection and urban planning using geospatial data.

Among the participants was Luka Turmanidze from Georgia, a student at Hong Kong Baptist University, who worked on improving AI systems that distinguish real photographs from AI-generated images.

He said the project revealed that the system struggled more with smaller, compressed images commonly shared online, leading the research team to rethink how the AI was prompted rather than focusing only on the images themselves.

Another intern, Vania Raya Rios from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, joined a project aimed at making machine translation systems faster and more efficient.

She said the experience highlighted the importance of engineering challenges alongside machine learning, noting that building reliable AI systems requires extensive testing, debugging and reproducible environments.

Since launching in 2023, the internship programme has expanded to offer students opportunities across MBZUAI’s computing, mathematical sciences, biological sciences and life sciences divisions.

Professor Song said the programme is already helping build a pipeline of future researchers, with several former interns applying to MBZUAI’s graduate programmes or continuing their research careers in the UAE.

As competition for AI talent continues to grow globally, the programme reflects Abu Dhabi’s efforts to position itself as a destination where young researchers can gain early experience and contribute to real-world AI innovation.