The Harvey Mudd College REU brings 10 undergraduates to Claremont in order to engage them in research and encourage graduate study in computer science. The program provides a microcosm of the graduate experience through a set of four projects under a broadly-scoped systems umbrella. The first develops algorithms for estimating cophylogenetic trees based on biological host/parasite data. Students' algorithms have been encapsulated in a software package named Jane, currently in use by several biological research groups. The second effort investigates approaches for automatically creating - and helping humans create - jazz. Its Impro-visor software has thousands of users and supports both the jazz and computational music communities. The third project creates efficient algorithms for memory management within garbage-collected computer languages such as Java, and the fourth project tests machine-learning and computer-vision-based algorithms that improve the state-of-the-art of performance of low-cost robot platforms, such as the iRobot Create.

In addition to the contributions of these four projects within each of their domains of specialization, the REU's environment emphasizes the benefits of pursuing CS at the graduate level for participants who had not previously considered graduate work. Challenging research problems prompt students' guided development of research skills: investigation, presentation, and publication. Introductions by advisors transition into student-led talks and culminate with publications and conference experiences during or after the summer. Although proud of the academic contributions of the REU participants, the program's most important impact lies in its cultivation of the next generation of CS researchers.

Project Report

has been the center of a large gathering of undergraduate researchers at Harvey Mudd College for the past three summers. The program served two primary goals within the NSF's Intellectual Merit rubric: (1) to engage promising undergraduate scholars in publishable-quality CS research and (2) to promote the pursuit of graduate CS study, to the mutual benefit of schools and students. The program is delighted that over a dozen peer-reviewed publications have emerged from the undergraduates' research work. For instance, "An extreme case of plant-insect codiversification: figs and fig-pollinating wasps," co-authored by REU participants and several outside researchers, established the largest-ever cophylogenetic tree built upon a foundation of biological field data (Systematic Biology 61(6), 2012). Without the algorithmic and software resources of the REU team, the computation of that co-evolutionary structure would still be in process today... . Our program's work in Intelligent Music Software has led to the open-source Impro-Visor system, used as a tool by both the CS and jazz musician communities beyond their overlap. With well over 10,000 downloads, we now receive applications from students already familiar with the prior work of previous summer teams! Engaging students in such intellectually rewarding projects has generated strong interest in graduate school and NSF fellowship opportunities. Even in the current remarkable private labor market for CS graduates, the HMC CS REU has maintained a greater than 50% conversion rate into graduate programs including campuses such as MIT, UW, and the UC system. Even as the program celebrates our CS-research ecosystem, the HMC REU consciously avoids limiting itself to the efforts and demographic groups that have traditionally made up a disproportionate amount of that ecosystem. To that end, the program sought two top-level broader impacts: (1) cohorts and conditions that are inclusive of students from identity groups poorly represented in CS, (2) research efforts which seek to bring computational skills and resources to communities that could benefit from them. The REU's projects and program have included just over 50% women researchers during the past three summers, a substantial increase from prior REU offerings. Accompanying this balance have been several concurrent changes, including significantly higher research production, a increase in our applicant pool to about 250/year, and increased across-the-board participant enjoyment of the summer experience. The REU also provided the scaffolding from which we have institutionalized connections with schools where undergraduate research is a rarer resource, as well as two-year schools in our vicinity. Students from these institutions now make up a larger portion of our annual cohorts. In addition, the program's projects have sought outreach applications in their own right, e.g., participants in 2013 helped develop CS curriculum for precollege students in districts without prior experience with CS. The robotics research, too, has focused on increasing the sensing and reasoning capabilities of inexpensive autonomous platforms. Those capabilities, in turn, make additional curriculum possible, e.g., leading to workshops at venues such as SIGCSE, as well as publications at IEEE TePRA and AAAI Spring Symposia. Perhaps as important as both the intellectual merit and broader impacts goals noted above, the Harvey Mudd REU strives to foster scientists who enjoy - even proselytize - the experience of CS research. Our assessments of past participants show that, to a large extent, the program has succeeded in this overarching goal: our reseachers uniformly give the experience top marks in answering the questions "something" and "something else." Even as this program comes to a close, we look forward to adapting its lessons to future summers of engaging undergraduate CS research at Harvey Mudd College.

Agency
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute
Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS)
Type
Standard Grant (Standard)
Application #
1063169
Program Officer
Maria Zemankova
Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2011-02-01
Budget End
2014-01-31
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2010
Total Cost
$367,461
Indirect Cost
Name
Harvey Mudd College
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
Claremont
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
91711