This award funds a new CISE REU site at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. A multi-disciplinary team of Information Technology (IT) faculty in Computer Science, Bio-Informatics, Information Assurance, and Computer Engineering will collaborate to establish a site that will focus on research in wireless communications (WC) with projects centered on real-time patient monitoring using a Smart Home environment. The overall objectives of the REU Site are to promote early engagement of undergraduate students in research, to foster active learning through hands-on experiments in a collaborative research environment, and to inspire the students to pursue higher degree IT programs and research careers. The SECURE program will achieve these objectives by offering a group of carefully and extensively designed research projects with a wide range of technological challenges for the participating undergraduates to explore and experiment. The program will enable the students to develop research skills, laboratory skills, logical reasoning, problem solving techniques, and effective communication skills via a variety of REU Site activities and it will establish long-term mentoring relationships between the students and faculty through intensive collaboration and social interaction. This site is co-funded by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program.
The intellectual merit of this project lies in the strong team of experienced researchers and the outstanding collaborative research environment. The projects are drawn from original and urgent research problems in the field, ranging from core WC technology to information assurance issues and multimedia specifics in WC, as well as applications of WC in medical and consumer informatics. The research program will promote the development and application of WC technology in our daily lives and work places and has the potential to advance the current state of research in these important areas.
The broader impacts include providing students with a taste of exciting IT research that will have a direct bearing on their future career paths. The program will promote the embedment of research components in our current undergraduate curricula and thus enhance the education of a broad range of students beyond the REU site participants. The program plans to recruit a diverse group of students with a focus on women and minorities from the mid-west region of the country. Thus the project has the potential to produce new computer science graduate students and faculty members and to advance discovery and understanding while promoting learning.
program at University of Nebraska – Omaha (UNO) focused on promoting early engagement of undergraduate students in research, fostering active learning through hands-on experiments in a collaborative research environment, and inspiring the students to pursue higher degree IT programs and research careers. Overall the participants reported high levels of satisfaction with their faculty mentors and with their fellow undergraduate team members. All participants agreed that the REU research program provided them with much needed experience in research. Participants reported that projects provided stimulation and excellent opportunities to learn through inquiry. Certain themes did emerge in the open ended response questions. For example, participants reported encountering some frustrations with project glitches and problems. Also, most research teams did reach the majority of their research goals by the end of the summer. Even with some issues the total experience was given high marks for overall impact on academic and self- efficacy among participants. In the initial planning stages of the project we set as our instructional goals to positively influence the academic and self-efficacy of the participants in computing and computing research. The results of our pre/post surveys have shown strong positive trends. Specifically, we see these trends in academic and self-efficacy, career efficacy, computing identity and in valuing of computing.
