Are you a PhD machine learning student looking for a meaningful internship?
Do you want to use your skills for Social Good?
Imperial College London and BarefootLaw are offering a 6-month internship (duration flexible), based in Kampala, Uganda, to improve a machine learning recommendation which helps the lawyers at BarefootLaw to provide free legal guidance.
More details:
BarefootLaw is a not-for-profit organisation that leverages the abundance of mobile phones to provide free legal guidance to Ugandans via social media and SMS. As people have been quick to adopt BarefootLaw’s services, the number of service requests has grown over the years. BarefootLaw’s ambition is to expand and reach 50 million people by 2030. There is, therefore, a strong demand for a system to assist the lawyers in their mission.
In various partnerships with academic research labs, BarefootLaw has developed a system, called Winnie. It receives legal questions from people seeking BarefootLaw services through three different written channels: 1) Facebook, 2) SMS, and 3) Emails. The developed system is intended to speed up processing responses to questions by generating answers to be sent back to the information seeker. Winnie takes the incoming question, preprocesses the text, and converts the natural language text to a structured representation. Then, structured representations of questions are fed into a machine-learning model to estimate the answer to a given question. These estimated answers are, thereafter, used by the lawyers to formulate their recommendations.
This internship will be based at BarefootLaw in Kampala under the guidance of Prof Claudia Clopath of the Clopath Lab at Imperial College London . The goal for the student is to develop the machine learning model further in light of the recent improvement of Large Language Models.
Application information:
Your application should be sent to [email protected] with a 1-page motivation statement and a CV. Applications sent before May 17th will be considered first, but it will be a rolling deadline. The internship will start at the end of summer (date flexible). All travel costs will be covered and the student will get a small bursary.
