SEACrowd Apprentice Program is a remote research program (Feb 1 – Jun 30, 2026) that pairs experienced researchers with early-career researchers across Southeast Asia to build models, datasets, and publishable research. Small, mentored teams work on scoped projects with structured milestones and community support, creating a clear path toward PhD admissions, jobs, and stronger SEA regional capacity.

Each mentee will join a team of 2–3 mentors and 2+ fellow mentees to execute a research project over four months. The program emphasizes hands-on experience, mentorship, and peer learning, culminating in a research report, which can turn into paper submission to top AI/ML/NLP conferences as arranged by the team.

2026 Research Topics

1. Multilingual Agentic for Underrepresented Regions – Developing evaluation frameworks for agent-based language models in low-resource languages
2. CoRaL: Contextual Relevance and Linguistic Enrichment – Multi-dimensional data curation framework for low-resource language training corpora
3. Reasoning Agentic LLM Router – Skill-based routing mechanisms to reduce inference costs while maintaining performance
4. Selective Memory Layer Finetuning – Architectural solutions for continual learning using memory layers
5. Knowledge Distillation in Multilingual Vision-Text Models – Creating compact vision-language embeddings for edge devices

Who Can Apply

Anyone who meets at least one of the following:

• Your affiliation is from Southeast Asia (SEA).
• You were born in SEA.
• You are especially doing SEA-related research.

What Increases Your Chances

• Bachelor’s degree with a publication or Master’s degree.
• Clear AI research goals (pre-PhD programs, early-year PhD, or prior collaboration with mentors).
• Fit with project topics, capability, motivation, and mentors (assessed via application + interview).

What You’ll Gain

• Certificate of achievement upon completion
• Letter of recommendation for PhD/job applications (for strong contributors)
• Potential publication at top ML/AI/NLP venues (first authorship reserved for project leads)
• Mentorship from experienced AI researchers
• Peer network with similar research interests
• Hands-on experience in collaborative AI research

Check out previous batch publications!

Application Process

• Apply here: Nov 17 – Dec 17, 2025 (23:59 UTC-12)
• Selection: mid-Dec 2025 – Jan 19, 2026
  • Round 1: Application screening
  • Round 2: Online interview
• Team announcement: mid-Jan 2026

Program Schedule

• Kickoff: Feb 1, 2026
• Mid-term milestone: End of Mar / early Apr (internal review)
• End-term milestone: End of Jun (SEACrowd-wide + external committee)

Publications are encouraged when ready, not tied to specific conference deadlines.

Link to Application

For more information: https://seacrowd.org/apprenticeship