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As the school year winds down, many Ph.D. students seize the opportunity to put their expertise to work in industry settings, tackling research beyond the realm of academia. Several iSchool Ph.D. students have done just that, gaining valuable experience as research interns.  

These internships provide Ph.D. students with opportunities to apply their research skills in real-world settings, offering them the chance to uncover new areas of research and deepen their understanding of existing ones. 

Ph.D. candidate Bin Han explored his research interests in the applications of large language models (LLMs), working as a research scientist intern with the Mail Science team at Yahoo last summer.

At Yahoo mail, a labeling system classifies emails in certain categories but only works for emails in English. Han was responsible for benchmarking the performance of LLMs in classification tasks across multiple languages. He then evaluated the LLMs’ ability to generate classification labels intended for pre-training a new and more inclusive system. 

“My research interests also involve the applications of LLMs,” he said. “Throughout the internship, I learned more knowledge of their capabilities in multilingual classification tasks and more advanced fine-tuning techniques.”

Similarly, another Ph.D. student found interest in the application of AI models used in contexts of other languages and cultures outside of English. 

Saloni Dash interned at Microsoft Research with the special projects team. She worked on developing a method for multilingual and multicultural red teaming, specifically for misinformation harms.

At Microsoft, her manager had been working to understand the use of generative AI in elections around the world. 

“Before the U.S. election, we were trying to come up with this method that could potentially be used to mitigate the harms of these generative AI models being used to produce misinformation,” Dash said.

Dash and her team came up with a novel method that not only looked at the harms of generative AI misinformation in English, but also began to understand harms in different contexts and languages. By the end of her internship, they gave a successful demonstration of their findings to the company.   

“We were able to show how the model was producing convincing misinformation in different languages, not only within the U.S. context, but also within the Indian context,” she said. Now she is working on a paper about her research findings. 

Many Ph.D. students find that applying their research skills in an industry setting offers beneficial hands-on experience, helping bridge the gap between academic research and real-world challenges.

Dash said, “Often in academia, it's very easy to get wrapped up in the theory and remain thinking in that scope without wondering how our research is actually being used in the real world. So I think the industry experience was really useful for me to know exactly what kind of research is useful for real world applications and what is out there that can make a real difference in people's lives.”

Rotem Landesman also gained some research experience outside of academia, as she interned with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and explored what we know and have yet to learn about the interactions of young children with AI technologies. 

Landesman summarized the team's findings and insights in a on the Joan Ganz Cooney Center website, and has gone on to explore different facets of that work throughout the year with other industry partners.

"This is the tip of the iceberg, since there's so much research underneath there and so many conversations and thoughts that have gone into this that I hope to explore in a deeper way in the future,” she said. 

She found this experience gave her an opportunity to explore something new, noting that it also helped her see that there is a world of research outside of academia.

She said, “I usually don’t work with young kids since my work focuses on teens, so it was nice to experience something different for the summer.” 

Amidst the busy lifestyle in academia, Landesman encourages all Ph.D. students to “lift up your head from the noise and see that there are other things out there.”