AI Research Intern

Company Description

At Intuitive, we are united behind our mission: we believe that minimally invasive care is life-enhancing care. Through ingenuity and intelligent technology, we expand the potential of physicians to heal without constraints.
As a pioneer and market leader in robotic-assisted surgery, we strive to foster an inclusive and diverse team, committed to making a difference. For more than 25 years, we have worked with hospitals and care teams around the world to help solve some of healthcare’s hardest challenges and advance what is possible.
Intuitive has been built by the efforts of great people from diverse backgrounds. We believe great ideas can come from anywhere. We strive to foster an inclusive culture built around diversity of thought and mutual respect. We lead with inclusion and empower our team members to do their best work as their most authentic selves.
Passionate people who want to make a difference drive our culture. Our team members are grounded in integrity, have a strong capacity to learn, the energy to get things done, and bring diverse, real world experiences to help us think in new ways. We actively invest in our team members to support their long-term growth so they can continue to advance our mission and achieve their highest potential.
Join a team committed to taking big leaps forward for a global community of healthcare professionals and their patients. Together, let’s advance the world of minimally invasive care.

Job Description

Primary Function of Position

We are seeking a self-motivated intern to join our AI Research and Development team in projects focused on developing a variety of AI foundation models based on multi-modal surgical data. This role is an exciting opportunity to join a newly formed team, advance the state-of-the-art in surgical robotics, and test your knowledge in a challenging problem-solving environment.

Essential Job Duties

• Research, design and implement AI algorithms using multi-modal data including image, video, text, and robotics.
• Develop software and methods for training, evaluation and testing such AI algorithms.
• Develop evaluation metrics in the context of specific applications and perform extensive validation experiments to access accuracy, efficiency, and generalizability.
• Work with existing datasets and contribute to efforts in creating new datasets.

Qualifications

Required Skills and Experience

University Hiring Program Eligibility Requirements:

• University Enrollment: Must be currently enrolled in and returning to an accredited degree-seeking academic program in the Fall.
• Internship Work Period: Must be available to work starting October 2024 and full-time (approximately 40 hours per week) during a 10-12 week period starting May or June. Specific start dates are shared during the recruiting process.

Required Education and Training

• Current enrollment in an Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or Robotics with emphasis on AI, Machine Learning and Computer Vision or related degree-seeking program at the Master’s or Doctorate level.

Working Conditions

None

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Publications in top-tier conferences/journals
• Experience building systems based on machine learning and/or deep learning methods.
• Proven hands-on Python skills.
• Proven hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks such PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Caffe.

Good hands-on experience with the state-of-the-art deep learning models for language modelling and text retrieval of structured and unstructured text.

Good hands-on experience with open-source LLM models and libraries (HuggingFace, LLaMa, LangChain, LlamaIndex, etc).

• Self-starter and able to work in a dynamic and results oriented environment.
• (Preferred) Experience extending and innovating on LLM/AI agent techniques. Experience in one or more of RLHF, DPO, finetuning, RAG, CoT, and multi-agent reasoning.
• (Preferred) Experience with model quantization, LLM edge hardware deployment, prompt engineering, and/or data synthesis.

Additional Information

Due to the nature of our business and the role, please note that Intuitive and/or your customer(s) may require that you show current proof of vaccination against certain diseases including COVID-19.  Details can vary by role.

Intuitive is an Equal Employment Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer. We provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants and employees, and prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, without regard to race, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, color, age, religion, protected veteran or disability status, genetic information or any other status protected under federal, state, or local applicable laws.

EEO and AA Policy

We will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records in accordance with fair chance laws.

We provide market-competitive compensation packages, inclusive of base pay (paid at an hourly rate), benefits, and a housing allowance. It would not be typical for someone to be hired at the top end of range for the role, as actual pay will be determined based on several factors, including relevant skills and experience for this internship, degree-seeking academic program (PhD, Master’s, Bachelor’s, etc), year in school, and location. The hourly rate is prorated against the intern program salaries listed and total program compensation will be based on internship duration.