This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This REU site is focused on cognitive communications at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and hosts 10 undergraduate students for 10 weeks for 3 years. The site recruits, trains, and retains undergraduate students to research by supporting them in the following ways: ? Prepares them to think creatively and independently; ? Motivates them to pursue graduate studies; ? Helps them to develop general research skills in an interdisciplinary context; ? Allows them to gain hands-on experience in cognitive radios, wireless networking, and their applications; ? Promotes a sense of confidence, team spirit, and an appreciation of the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration in creating new knowledge; ? Exposes them to the intellectual excitement involved in research activities; and ? Teaches them to effectively assimilate latest research, assess their own knowledge, present experimental results, effectively prepare reports and publications, and understand the methods for translating ?research to practice (R2P).?
Intellectual Merit: Cognitive communications is an area of high interest to researchers in wireless communications. The mentors in the project have a strong background in this area and are well suited to carry out the projects with the students. The site has access to a high quality test bed for student experiments.
Broader Impacts: This project recruits a high percentage of the students from underrepresented groups in computing. They especially focus upon minority serving institutions without large research programs.
