The focus of the Berkeley CS REU site will be computer science projects that show clearly how the research solves important problems for our society. Information technology represents one of the most critical technological developments of our era. In this context, the CSIS REU site will bring students together in computational and systems biology, graphics and multimedia, cyber-security, reliable, adaptive and distributed systems, and information technology for developing nations.REU students will be required to understand and report on specific applications of their research for the betterment of humankind. For example, REU students working in the area of cyber- security will deal with the social, technical, commercial, and policy aspects of preserving privacy and defending critical infrastructure, which are key factors in realizing the full benefits of IT. A second example is the project in Intensive Care, developing an infrastructure and methodology to manage large amounts of clinical data for patients with life-threatening illness or injury. Student researchers will join the effort to establish a scalable warehouse for critical care data to facilitate multi-institution collaboration in the interest of healing. Another project opportunity involves human-centered designpractices:contextual inquiry into the needs of clients to understand the needs of a user community, with particular interest in assistive technology for the disabled. This site is co-funded by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program.
REU Site SUPERB: Computer Science in the Interest of Society NSF Award No. 0754843 Program Director: Professor Stuart Russell, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley Title: Examining How Software Developers Seek Help (and Code) Online This project analysed design features of online question and answer forums using large-scale data analysis, combined with qualitative research methods. A paper from the project was accepted for publication at CHI2011, one of the premier research conferences in human-computer interaction: "Design Lessons from the Fastest Q & A Site in the West." www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bjoern/papers/mamykina-stackoverflow-chi2011.pdf Bard Undergraduate Bella Manoim worked through SUPERB-CSIS on StackOverflow.com, one of the largest and most active collaborative question and answering websites for programmers. Over the 8 week REU program at Cal, supervised by Professor Bjoern Hartmann, she queried the openly available StackOverflow.com data dump to create visualizations of user data and statistics Impact: This study improves our understanding on how to design social computing systems for technical domains. It explains which design decisions can dramatically improve the utility and performance of Q & A systems. Explanation/background: In the age of internet search, the craft of programming has changed dramatically: many programmers construct programs by combining snippets found in online examples, tutorials, and forum posts. In this project. The Berkeley team investigated how developers go about searching for such materials through analyzing programmer's browsing histories and mining server logs of popular programming help sites.
