This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This site at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs hosts 8 students for 10 weeks in the summers of three years to do research in the areas of computer vision, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge management, and related topics. The experience includes a combination of theoretical reading and research with a hands-on environment to increase the scope of participants? knowledge of the project areas. The students attend classes to be introduced to the topics and also to obtain and in-depth understanding of selected topics. They also perform hands-on research, and are exposed to ethical issues. Researchers from MITRE, an industrial partner, are also serving as mentors in this project. This provides the students with an interesting introduction to, and training in, both applied and academic research.
Intellectual Merit: The research areas of computer vision, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge management are especially important to applied research and technology transfer in our age of information based society and workplaces. The researchers have strong track records in their areas of expertise, and have tied their scholarly strengths to interesting, timely, and useful interdisciplinary projects that connect to linguistics, biometrics, and bioinformatics, for example.
Broader Impact: The projects that have been chosen are attractive to students in that they show the transfer of research to practical problems of our time. This assures that students who engage in this experience are more likely to continue to engage in technology research and development.
