This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This REU Site hosts ten students each year to engage in software language engineering research for eight weeks in the summer. This builds research and technical communication skills in the students through training and practice during the summer program and through experience at their home institutions. The students also engage in a professional conference after the summer program concludes. At the beginning of the summer program the students are provided with orientation and team building exercises to embolden students to initiate team projects and to engage with the faculty mentors and their graduate students.
Intellectual Merit: Software language engineering is the application of a software engineering approach to the development, use, and maintenance of software languages. Specific student projects are involved with the maintenance of multi-language software systems, the development of pedagogical functional programming languages, and language constructs and libraries for programming embedded systems. The PIs have a strong track record of research in this area and have demonstrated experience in leading undergraduate student research.
Broader Impacts: A principal objective of this REU Site is the recruitment of a diverse group of talented students. Via a focused recruitment effort this site engages students from underrepresented groups and undergraduate institutions in computer science research. During the recruitment process, the PIs establish contact with faculty and students at community colleges, undergraduate institutions, women's colleges, and historically black colleges and universities and give presentations about opportunities available at the REU site and, more generally, in computer science research. Once students are accepted for participation in the REU Site, the faculty mentors and their graduate students guide the participants through research projects and also encourage them to consider attending graduate school and remaining active in the computer science research community. After returning to their home institutions the participants give presentations to their fellow undergraduate students, further broadening the group of students impacted by the proposed REU Site. In addition, all participants have the opportunity to attend a professional conference and to disseminate the results of their research, either informally through conversations with other attendees, or formally through an oral or poster presentation.
