This site provides undergraduate students with the opportunity to engage in research involving interesting and challenging technical issues in the emerging field of home and consumer networking, promotes the professional development of participating undergraduates, and encourages them to consider pursuing advanced degrees and careers in science and engineering. Home and consumer networking is expected to be a significant market in the near future. There are, however, many challenges in this emerging field. These include quality of multimedia services, network and device heterogeneity, mobility, device intelligence, content and rights management, security and privacy, user experience/knowledge, and new services such as eldercare.
Intellectual Merit: The students participate in the PIs? on-going funded research, investigate the above mentioned challenging issues, and provide viable solutions and insight. This research activity is expected to lead to a better understanding of the technical and performance issues and tradeoffs in home and consumer networking, and thus facilitate the rapid deployment of advanced home and consumer networking services and applications that are of significance to our nation?s economy and our quality of life. Ten students engage in a 10-week summer school every year for three years at the University of Missouri ? Columbia (MU). They are encouraged to continue participate in the projects after the summer program. The summer school includes a 2-week short course, followed by approximately 8-weeks of group research on selected projects that are carefully designed and well aligned with the PIs? on-going research. The students also engage in weekly seminars and weekly informal lunch meetings with faculty, weekly individual student-faculty meetings and a meeting on graduate school preparation, interim progress reports and final presentations. The students have many opportunities to present their research results at various venues at the campus, state, national, and international levels.
Broader Impacts: This is a unique opportunity for the undergraduate students recruited mostly from institutions in the State of Missouri to experience training and research in the interdisciplinary areas of home and consumer networking. By bootstrapping through an already established network of recruiting forces in institutions across the State of Missouri, the site especially welcomes applications from women engineers, underrepresented minorities and students from colleges that have limited research opportunities. The project is of great interest to undergraduate students due to its close interaction with our daily life. It exposes them to exciting state-of-the-art home and consumer networking technologies allows them to gain insight on the culture of graduate school by closely working with graduate students and faculty mentors. Ultimately this builds the desire, confidence and skills necessary to pursue advanced degrees in science and engineering. The research projects are sufficiently sophisticated that this summer experience will enable and encourage the students to publish and present the results in technical conferences in the specific research areas. The project is professionally evaluated by an external assessment specialist. The outcomes of this assessment are expected to contribute to educational research on effective structures for involving undergraduates in research. The outcomes of this project will form an integral part of our educational agenda by contributing to the content of courses in networking and security.
and investigated important issues related to new media, eldercare at home, virtual-physical interaction, ad hoc networking, and security. The REU Site was supported by NSF, MU Office of Research, MU Office of Undergraduate Research, the College of Engineering, and the Department of Computer Science. In this REU Site, students participated in the principal investigators' ongoing funded research projects by investigating, implementing, and testing viable solutions to technical challenges in the area of home and consumer networking technologies. This research activity has led to a better understanding of the technical issues, performance, and trade-offs in home and consumer networking, thus facilitating the rapid deployment of advanced home and consumer networking services and applications. The systems developed by the students have become part of the platforms for on-going research in the PIs and faculty mentors' research group. In the past 3 years (2010-2012), each year 10 students were recruited and participated in a ten-week summer program. The 30 students were from 8 Missouri Universities and 7 out-of-state Universities. The recruitments were focused on institutions in Missouri, although applicants from institutions outside Missouri were also considered. Female students, underrepresented minority students, and students from undergraduate institutions were particularly encouraged. The students were housed in the on-campus housing, together with typically around 100 additional students from other undergraduate research programs on campus. The participants took a 1-2 week short course, worked with other students and a faculty mentor and a graduate student mentor to carry out a research project, presented their progress at various points throughout the summer, and wrote project reports and gave final presentations. In addition, the students gave poster presentations in a campus-wide research forum organized for multiple undergraduate research programs on campus. During the program, a number of surveys, including a Pre-Assessment survey, a Post Knowledge test, and a pre- and post- Group Satisfaction and Effectiveness survey were conducted by the program’s external evaluator. During the REU program, the students were provided scientific guidance and educational advice and were fully exposed to the entire research process from project planning to result dissemination. The summer program has exposed the students to collaborative research environments, fostered their enthusiasm for science and engineering, and developed their skills needed for pursuing advanced degrees. The REU program has achieved its goal of motivating students to pursue graduate school. Several students have expressed their interest in pursuing graduate school after each year's summer REU experience. We have learned that one 2010 REU student from MU received a prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship from NSF in 2012 and is currently a Ph.D. student with Stanford University, another 2010 REU student is now a MS student with University of Alabama. The students’ work and publications are posted at our REU website (www.cs.missouri.edu/~reu/). Their work has resulted in six peer-reviewed international conference publications (included three IEEE international conference papers, one ACM international conference paper, and one SPIE conference paper), and sixteen poster presentations in campus-wide research forums in the past 3 years. Publications (REU students underlined): A. Lobzhanidze, W. Zeng, P. Gentry, and A. Taylor, "Mainstream Media vs. Social Media for Trending Topic Prediction – An Experimental Study," work-in-progress, Proc. IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conf. Jan. 2013. P. Baskett, Y. Shang, W. Zeng, and B. Guttersohn, "SDNAN: Software-Defined Networking in Ad hoc Networks of Smartphones," Proc. IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, (demo paper), Jan. 2013. P. Baskett, M. Patterson, Y. Shang, and T. Trull, "Towards A System for Body-Area Sensing and Detection of Alcohol Craving and Mood Dysregulation," Proc. IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, (demo paper), Jan. 2013. T. Alexenko, M. Biondo, D. Banisakher, M. Skubic, "Android-based Speech Processing for Eldercare Robotics," demo paper, ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, March 2013, Santa Monica, CA, USA. D. Karpman, D. Ashbrook, X. Li, Y. Duan, W. Zeng, "Lidar depth image compression using clustering, re-indexing, and JPEG2000," Proc. of SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing, Conference on Laser Radar Technology and Applications XVI, vol. 8037, April 2011.
