[UG] Part-Time Undergrad Job Opportunity

The following announcement is from [Professor Itti – itti@usc.edu]. Please contact them directly if you have any questions.

Professor Laurent Itti’s computational neuroscience lab has paid research openings for a new project that will create an AI-assisted visual aid for blind individuals. The new device will combine high-speed, omnidirectional machine vision with state of the art AI reasoning. This project opens up new research opportunities in machine vision, deep learning, AI and large vision/language models, embedded software development, and electronics. In addition, we seek to engage the blind community throughout the project by conducting focus groups, interviews, and field testing of our devices. Talented undergraduate and graduate students who are passionate about this topic, and who are able to regularly commit some time, are encouraged to join.

Required skills or interests:

– experience with machine vision on embedded systems (e.g., stereo, object detection), or

– experience with board-level electronics design (Altium, high-speed designs including MIPI, PCIe, LPDDR5), or

– experience with FPGA design, or

– experience with small LLM/VLM customization (e.g., LoRA, RAG), or

– experience with industrial design and ergonomics, or

– interest in or experience with running human experiments (our experiments will consist of several mixed indoor/outdoor tasks, such as going to the bookstore to buy a pencil and then to the Leavy library to meet a friend – you will shadow blind participants helped by our device and ensure their safety, but you will otherwise not help them. They will also use their usual assistive devices, such as a smartphone, a long cane, or a guide dog), or

– interest in or experience in design issues, usability issues, privacy issues, social acceptance issues, legal issues, etc for assistive devices for blind individuals.

If interested, please send a resume and brief statement describing your interests and relevant skills to Professor Itti at itti@usc.edu

Published on October 23rd, 2025Last updated on October 23rd, 2025