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URO (Undergraduate Research Opportunities) Zone
Why should you choose Computer Science and Engineering?
Welcome to the URO Zone, a site dedicated to undergraduate research in computer science.
Zachary Abel
Senior at Harvard University
Working with an MIT professor, Zachary attacked the problem of whether hinged dissections always exist-that is, whether a single connected, hinged assembly can always fold between arbitrary configurations. Hinged dissections have been studied for more than 100 years, and many believed that they do not always exist. However, Zachary proved that they do in fact always exist.
Based on the strength of this work, Zachary was invited to participate in a yearly collaborative Computational Geometry Workshop at which he made significant contributions in both 2008 and 2009. In addition to all this, Zachary has maintained a near-perfect GPA.
Elyot Grant
Senior at University of Waterloo
Working under an undergraduate research award, Elyot was presented with a list of well-known open problems and rapidly proceeded to solve several of them. The most important relates to Kuratowski's theorem on closures in topological spaces and how it relates to formal languages. In particular, he discovered a clever and subtle proof that there is a clopen partition between two words if, and only if, the words do not commute. In the short time since then, Elyot's ideas on the topological separation of words have already been taken up by researchers in Europe, which shows that these ideas are important and in the mainstream of theoretical computer science.
After completing the work above, Elyot joined a separate research project in the area of Combinatorics and Optimization, and produced interesting results on approximation algorithms for NP-hard covering problems. In addition to possessing mathematical skills, Elyot is an expert programmer and has had a number of programming jobs while in college.
Richard Matthew McCutchen
Junior at University of Maryland
Matt has a long history of research going back to high school. His high school work on the "popular matching" problem (e.g., matching a set of people to jobs trying to satisfy their preferences) has already been cited by several other researchers. At Maryland, Matt has worked on streaming algorithms for clustering and developed a new algorithm for handling outliers. Matt also has worked on various projects in the area of programming languages.
Aside from research, Matt has maintained a near perfect GPA and has had great success at programming contests. He has qualified for the International Olympiad of Informatics three times, winning two gold medals and one silver medal.
Justine Sherry
Senior at University of Washington
A longstanding impediment to the study of the Internet is that it does not explicitly expose information about its topology, paths or performance. Utilizing the IP timestamp option (an obscure and little-used aspect of the IP specification) Justine developed several techniques to measure unknown aspects of the Internet. She contributed critical timestamp-based algorithms to the Reverse Traceroute project, which discovers routing paths from a distant host back to a local source, improving both its accuracy and coverage. Having become probably the world's greatest expert on the IP timestamp option she then turned to developing solutions to two other Internet measurement problems using IP timestamps: router alias resolution and measuring the one-way latency of backbone links.
In addition to performing valuable research, Justine served last year as vice chair of the student chapter of ACM at her university, where she worked to engage other undergraduate students in research by revamping graduate student poster sessions and introducing the undergraduate research information sessions at the University of Washington. She is currently the chair of the student ACM-W women's chapter.
Lucy Vasserman
Senior at Pomona College
Lucy's research has focused on creating a mood classifier for text - a system that identifies the prevailing emotion conveyed by a given section of text as anger, happiness, sadness, etc. This required creating a computer learning system that could deal with sparse and noisy training data.
Following that, she has made significant progress in the particularly challenging task of detecting sarcasm. In addition to her research, Lucy taught a summer course in robotics at Pomona for local high school students. While she received support from the CS department, she initiated and created the entire program independently.
Di Wang
Senior at Cornell University
While maintaining a perfect GPA, Di has solved an open problem in theoretical Computer Science with applications to computer vision, and begun research on practical application of his ideas to image processing.
Di's work focuses on the NP-hard problem of Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO), which captures the essence of a variety of vision problems. Prior work by Prof. Endre Boros has identified a family of lower bounds of the optimal value, denoted by C2,C3,C4,..., and C2 can be computed using network flow. Two questions are of great interest about these bounds: 1) Can our understanding about C2 be generalized to C3,C4,..., and 2) Can we identify partial optimal assignment from the computation of these lower bounds. For the particular bound C3, Di's work answers both questions in the affirmative.
Hijung Shin
Senior at Princeton University
Over the years, there have been a number of projects seeking to use Computer Science techniques to help reassemble archeological artifacts such as broken wall paintings. However, these projects have typically used brute force approaches to matching pieces and have been only somewhat successful. Valentina pioneered a completely different approach based on detailed analysis of the way frescoes break. She created an algorithmic fracture model through a semi-automatic study of frescoes that have been reconstructed by hand. This model of the breaking process shows great promise for improving the automatic matching of pieces. The model also opens the door on other possibilities such as understanding what kinds of events caused the destruction of a particular wall.
In addition to quality research, Valentina is a star student ranked as one of the best in the entire university. She also tutors in Princetons Engineering Education for Kids program.
Peter Bailis
Senior at Harvard University
Peter created a system for proactively reducing average-case processor temperatures by injecting idle cycles into computation, decreasing cooling requirements. Leading a team of two undergraduates, one graduate student, and two faculty members, he extended this approach to large data centers and analytically determined that it could enable broader geographical adoption of free-cooling techniques (e.g., leveraging cold outside air). Peter also has worked on the Harvard RoboBees project, where he explored the relative importance of shared and private information in honeybee foraging models, which resulted in a paper that won the Best Student Paper award at a swarm intelligence conference. He has also contributed to the ongoing design and construction of a distributed operating system for micro-aerial vehicle swarms.
In addition to the research above, Peter has worked as a volunteer at the Harvard-based Small Claims Advisory Service, managing their IT infrastructure and assisting clients with legal requests.
Patrick Wendell
Senior at Princeton University
A key problem in deploying Internet-scale systems is directing client requests to the best (closest/most responsive) instance of a web site. Patrick designed, built, and deployed a system called DONAR that overcomes the limitations of the current state-of-the-art of replica selection and has both conceptual and practical contributions. The work realizes optimal replica selection through a robust distributed algorithm that is both stable and effective. He demonstrated this through formal proofs, extensive simulations, and real deployment. Today, DONAR runs on a network if global servers and provides replica selection for CoralCDN, a large content distribution network and MeasurementLab, a distributed research platform.
This past summer, Patrick worked at Cloudera. There, he quickly became one of the trusted committers to Apaches Avrothe RPC networking layer to be used in Hadoop, a distributed computing framework. Patricks work on Avro is designed to improve the performance, maintenance, and debugging of large distributed systems.
Mitchell Koch
Senior at Rice University
Mitchells main research focus has been on inferring models of signaling networks from large data sets containing expression levels of key proteins in human T-cells. Learning networks from data is computationally very hard, scaling super-exponentially in the number of nodes. Mitchell devised a clever method for assessing the confidence of connections and discovered six new crosstalk mechanisms in the T-cell signaling pathway.
Recently, he has developed new algorithms for learning dynamic Bayesian networks. He began doing research while only a sophomore in high school. His first project involved detecting cancerous lesions in images of prostate biopsies. He transitioned into the research track described above as a junior in high school and has continued it during his years at Rice.
Mark D. Leiserson
Senior at Tufts University
New high-throughput genomic experiments have resulted in massive graphs that can be mined for data about groups of genes that work together. One of the most useful patterns to look for in these graphs are small tightly connected subgraphs that have large negative maximum cuts. Mark (Max) was the lead student researcher on a project to automatically locate such subgraphs. He implemented the entire algorithm and devised a clean and elegant technique for pruning the results. In this work he has shown both computational and biological sophistication.
Since the summer after his freshman year at Tufts, Max has worked on algorithmic problems in Computational Molecular biology. His first project resulted in his co-authoring a publication in RECOMB 2009; currently he is the first author on a paper submitted to RECOMB 2011.
Xuexin (Alice) Zhu
Senior at Harvey Mudd College
A central problem in pen-based interfaces is how to transition smoothly between drawing and editing. Beginning In her sophomore year, Alice proposed, built and tested a novel pen-based interface technique and has continued to work on the system. In 2009, she won first place in the ACM student research competition for this work.
In addition to quality research, Alice is a superior student maintaining the best GPA of any CS major in her class while doing extensive work as a TA. She has won many prestigious awards in computer science, including an Anita Borg Scholarship and a Microsoft Scholarship.
- What is CS Research?
- Examples
- Finding Opportunities
- More Opportunities
- Awards
What is Research in Computer Science?
Computer science is the engine of the digital revolution, contributing to the emergence of entirely new industries and dramatic changes in quality of life.
Continuing advances in this digital revolution depend heavily on research in computer science.
There is a wide array (or is it a linked list?) of research areas in computer science, ranging from the applied to the theoretical. Virtually every topic that you've seen in your undergraduate curriculum has an associated and active area of research, from algorithms, architecture, and artificial intelligence to virtual reality (we couldn't think of any topics that end in w, x, y, or z, but let us know if you think of some!).
What is research in computer science? Some research is theoretical - for example designing and analyzing algorithms or investigating aspects of complexity theory. Some research is more applied and involves experiments, design, implementation, and testing. In every case, research is an exciting enterprise of intellectual exploration - - often with important implications for computer science and society.
Research in computer science is a highly social and collaborative enterprise. Many researchers work in groups and they frequently attend conferences where they present their ideas and interact with colleagues. In fact, many areas of computer science research intersect with other fields and it's quite common for computer scientists to interact with biologists, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, to name just a few.
If you think that CS research is all about banging away on a keyboard in a solitary windowless cubicle, think again!
Some Examples of Undergrad Research
Much of the research in computer science is highly accessible to undergraduates. In fact, undergraduates frequently make important contributions and publish papers in major conferences and journals.
J. T. Johnson and L. J. Healy were undergraduates at the University of Utah who contributed to the research and a paper published with professors, including the Nobel Laureate Mario Capecchi. J.T. Johnson III, M.S. Hansen, I. Wu, L.J. Healy, C.R. Johnson, G.M. Jones, M.R. Capecchi, C. Keller. "Virtual Histology of Transgenic Mouse Embryos for High-Throughput Phenotyping," In PLoS Genetics, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 471-477. April, 2006.
Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena were undergraduates at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur when they did some foundational research with Professor Manindra Agrawal, showing that the problem of determining whether or not a number is prime can be solved in polynomial time. Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, Nitin Saxena, "PRIMES is in P", Annals of Mathematics 160 (2004), no. 2, pp. 781-793.
Lucy Vasserman was a senior at Pomona College working with Dr. Sara Owsley Sood on a mood classifier for text - a system that identifies the prevailing emotion conveyed by a given section of text as anger, happiness, sadness, etc. Sood, S.O. and Vasserman, L. ESSE: Exploring Mood on the Web. International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media Data, 2009.
Finding Research Opportunities
NEW: We've created a new website to allow researchers to advertise undergraduate summer research positions and to allow students to find such opportunities. There is no charge for this service.
Your school may offer opportunities for engaging in research during the academic year either for credit or for pay. Don't be shy about talking to your academic adviser about such opportunities.
Another great way to engage in research is through a summer research program.
There are several national programs that offer undergraduate students to work on research at their own or a different university, college, or laboratory. These programs generally offer a stipend and sometimes offer support for housing, meals, and/or travel. Here are links to some of these programs.
The National Science Foundation REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) Program has research sites across the United States. Students typically work for 8 to 10 weeks on a research program with a faculty mentor.
The National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) has a program called USRA that supports undergraduate research.
The CREUC Program provides Canadian undergraduate women in computer science with summer research experiences.
The Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) offers numerous research programs for women in computing fields. These undergraduate programs include the DREU (Distributed Research Experience for Undergraduates) Program
More Research Opportunities
Some programs are not specifically for computing fields, but recruit students in all science and engineering fields.
- Several universities have summer undergraduate research fellowships, aka "SURFs" open to students to all institutions. Among these are:
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The Caltech SURF: Caltech's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships program introduces students to research under the guidance of seasoned research mentors at Caltech and JPL. - The Purdue University SURF: The SURF program provides students across all engineering, science and technology disciplines with an intensive research experience, allowing them to work closely with graduate students and professors in their respective schools.
- The National Institutes of Standards and Technolgy (NIST) has a SURF program.
- The National Security Agency (NSA) has a number of summer research programs for undergraduates.
- The Department of Energy's SULI program takes students from a variety of fields, including computer science, to participate in research at a Department of Energy research facility.
- The NREIP Program offers research opportunities at Department of Navy research laboratory.
- The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Fellowship Program supports students in a variety of fields, including computer science, to engage in research at their home institution.
- IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA has a summer research program for under-represented minority students.
- The Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California has summer internships for students interested in natural language processing.
Undergraduate Research Awards
If you're curious about what it's like to participate in research or you would like to find out what it might feel like to be in graduate school, you should consider getting involved in research as an undergraduate. Many students report that their undergraduate research was among the most meaningful experiences of their undergraduate years.
There are several computing research awards available to students who have done exceptionally good research as undergraduates. Some awards come with cash prizes and all come with fame and glory for you, your research adviser, and your institution. Some of these awards are:
The Computing Research Association (CRA) Undergraduate Research Award
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Research Competition
What have we missed on this page?
Please send suggestions or references to other resources to Ran Libeskind-Hadas (ran@cs.hmc.edu). Also please feel free to use the comments box below to post your questions, advice, resources and thoughts.
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