Student Research Opportunities

The Stanford Digital Economy Lab is an interdisciplinary research group that studies how digital technologies are transforming work, organizations, and the economy. The Lab focuses on three core areas of research: AI and the Future of Work, Measuring the Digital Economy, and Digital Platforms and Society. The Lab’s insights help companies, policymakers, students, and professionals rise to the challenges and opportunities created by digitization. The Stanford Digital Economy Lab is an initiative of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) and is co-sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

We are looking for students to support our three key areas of work:

• AI and the Future of Work: Understanding the future of the workforce in a rapidly changing global economy. 

• Measuring the Digital Economy: Creating better methods of measuring the health of an increasingly digital economy.

• Digital Platforms and Society: Exploring how digital technologies can transform platforms and social media infrastructure to benefit society

We are looking for students to assist with logistics of data gathering, cleaning, analyzing data using state of the art techniques, and data visualization. Proficiency with R or Python is required.

The Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) is an interdisciplinary center at HAI. CRFM advances both the science of foundation models and the responsible deployment of these models in society. Our research spans three broad pillars: (i) technical research (e.g. creating new methods to train better models), (ii) applied research (e.g. building models in high-impact domains like medicine) and (iii) society impact (e.g. informing public policy on foundation models).

We are looking for students across these three pillars. At this moment, we are looking for strong students with engineering/CS expertise to build CRFM infrastructure (e.g. the HELM benchmark for foundation models). In addition, we are looking for students with data science and policy expertise to advance our societal efforts (e.g. maintain the Ecosystem Graphs initiative for documenting the foundation model ecosystem, translating CRFM research into policy and industry standards). CRFM is a large entity with many ongoing research efforts, so we encourage students to apply proactively and specify precise specific interests/strengths, even if they may not relate to the few projects listed above.

The AI Index program at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) is looking for research assistants with excellent analytical and organizational skills and outstanding academic credentials to support research and data collection. The research and data collection would assist projects that support the next AI Index report and additional AI Index projects such as the legal AI database, AI regulations database and Global AI Vibrancy Tool. 

About AI Index: The AI Index program at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data relating to artificial intelligence. Our mission is to provide unbiased, rigorous, and comprehensive data for policymakers, researchers, journalists, executives, and the general public to develop a deeper understanding of the complex field of AI.

Job Purpose: Work under the direction of project researchers. Present findings in organized, professional documents.

Core Duties:

• Support the HAI research and AI Index staff, which includes carrying out bibliographical searches of judicial decisions in the United States, finding new information and scholarly publications, summarizing policy documents and other content and analysis.

• Conduct literature reviews, collect and analyze relevant material from legal case databases, conferences and seminars, government documents, academic journals and policy. publications, and reports from a variety of sources, including government agencies, NGOs, etc.

• Assist with drafting, editing, and proofreading published materials, such as research reports, and data briefs.

• Write summary documents; compile abstracts, summaries, and analyses of books and articles.

Education and Experience Requirements:

• Law school students, or junior, senior, Master’s students in political science, international relations, history, or public policy as with additional background in computer science.

• Work, research, or internship experience providing both quantitative and qualitative research support, and/or project coordination experience preferred.

• Creative research skills and strong writing skills are essential. Knowledge of and keen interest in AI desired.

HAI manages hundreds of annual programs including, grant-making, educational courses, and research, policy and industry convenings. We interface with faculty from all seven Stanford schools and researchers, industry leaders, and policymakers from across the globe. In order to continuously build upon and improve HAI programming in service of the overall mission, we are looking for students interested in utilizing data science and advanced analytics to inform leadership decisions in a data-driven manner.

Core duties include: data gathering, cleaning, analyzing and data visualization. Projects may involve:

• Determining the key research topics within the HAI portfolio and identifying any gaps

• Identifying the content that HAI's audiences are most interested in and better matching content with target audiences

• Conducting market research on new programming and initiative ideas

Responding to rapid advances in artificial intelligence and the urgent need to define its responsible use in health and medicine. Stanford School of Medicine (SoM) and Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) share a vision for the future where the benefits of AI across biomedical research, education, and patient care are broadly shared and the risks are mitigated. RAISE Health (Responsible AI for Safe and Equitable Health) seeks to accelerate current work at Stanford focused on responsible healthcare, translate the latest AI technologies into tangible health benefits while considering the critical ethical and safety issues and help others navigate this complex and evolving field.

We are looking for students to support our three key areas of work:

1. Establishing and maintaining a platform for sharing responsible AI in health and medicine standards, tools, models, data, research and best practices.

2. Defining structured frameworks for ethical standards and safeguards

3. Convening a diverse group of multidisciplinary innovators, experts and decision makers on the topic

The Stanford Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab) partners with government agencies and nonprofits to leverage AI and data science to modernize and revitalize the public sector. We are an interdisciplinary team of legal experts, data scientists, social scientists, and engineers who build and evaluate high-impact demonstration projects focused on some of society’s most urgent challenges. 

RegLab is hiring for a range of full-time and part-time positions. Please fill out the RegLab general interest form to apply for roles and refer to the RegLab website for the most up-to-date information.

We are looking for:

• Full-time Research Fellows: We regularly seek pre-doctoral research fellows to join our team. Recent Fellows are generally hired between the fall and early spring, but applications are evaluated on a rolling basis.

• Summer Institute: This is a full-time funded summer program (10-12 weeks) for graduate and undergraduate students from any academic institution. 

• Research Assistants: We seek motivated and engaged students who would like to use their skills to work on pressing social issues. Graduate, professional, and advanced undergraduate students with training in machine learning, data science, causal inference, and statistics are especially encouraged to reach out. Our preference is to support well-aligned direct research, thesis, or practicum projects by offering course credit. We may also have a limited number of paid research assistantships available each quarter.