During the spring and summer of 2026, 14 UMass sophomores and juniors participated in the AI for the Commonwealth Internship program, a collaborative initiative of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences and the Executive Office of Technology Services and Security (EOTSS) for the Commonwealth. The students were supported by faculty and staff from UMass Public Interest Technology Initiative and the Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and three student mentors from the 2025 cohort.
This program offers an exciting opportunity for students to collaborate with state agencies and UMass mentors, applying cutting-edge AI to real-world challenges that impact communities across Massachusetts. The program began in the spring semester with an experiential learning course where students gained first hand experience with a human centered design approach paired with modern software engineering practices. During the summer, the students held paid internships where they continued to collaborate with the UMass team and their clients to deliver mature prototypes to clients by the end of the summer. Additionally, AWS supported each team throughout the spring and summer through a robust mentoring programming, guiding students on best practices in leveraging AWS services for the projects.
This September they will be presenting their work to Governor Maura Healey and other Commonwealth stakeholders in the State House. (Read more about the Healey-Driscoll administration partnership with UMass, here.)
Learn about the AI for the Commonwealth Interns and their projects below.
Public Health Policy Navigator led by Michael Montanez, Vedant Naidu, Paransha Tajwani, Arundhati G. Vasishth
This project addresses a key challenge faced by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) and its local health departments and Inspectional Services Departments (ISDs): the lack of a centralized, real-time system for accessing regulatory information during inspections. This project aims to support inspectors by improving access to reliable, consistent regulatory information through an AI chatbot embedded within the Metrik platform, a statewide public health data and operations platform being developed by DPH to give all 351 local health departments and ISDs modern, standardized tools for managing inspections, complaints, permitting, and reporting.
Division of Ecological Restoration Media Management Platform led by Raza Alaqaband, Anish Ajith Kamath, Bhanu Sohan Pingali
This project addresses the challenges faced by the Division of Ecological Restoration (DER) in storing, searching, and organizing media assets used for publications within their current SharePoint-based system. This project will build an AI-based solution to address these challenges for our stakeholders, with the potential to improve internal efficiency, enhance service quality, and strengthen public perception and trust.
MassHealth Form Processing led by Meiling Chen, Urvi Gupta, Reeshab Singh
This project supports MassHealth in processing non-English documents more efficiently by partially automating their translation workflow through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text extraction and multilingual form-field mapping. The project will develop a human-in-loop approach by generating a pre-translated, structured English version of recurring forms and documents that can then be reviewed and finalized by third-party translation vendors.
UMass HR Assistant led by Kellan McIntosh, Eric Nguyen
UMassHR serves a large and diverse employee population across the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Currently, HR professionals face a high and continuous volume of “Ask HR” tickets related to benefits, payroll, onboarding, hiring processes, policies, and compliance matters. This project will develop an internal HR tool that assists staff in retrieving relevant information and generating drafts to create a more efficient and streamlined workflow. HR personnel would review and verify responses before sending them, ensuring accuracy while significantly reducing manual workload and enabling HR to assist employees at a faster rate.
Berkshire Regional Planning Plan Navigator led by Unmesh Reza and Dia Sutaria
The Berkshire Regional Planning Commission currently manages a large volume of decentralized, text-heavy municipal plans. The sheer volume of this unstructured data makes it functionally difficult and time-consuming for staff to cross-reference documents to identify shared, region-wide priorities. This project will develop a tool to enable the BRPC to easily analyze town plans and develop a proactive approach to long-term regional planning.
Student Menors
Three students who participated in last year’s program came back this summer to support the program as student mentors. These mentors were assigned to teams to provide project management and technical support for their teams.
