This REU site seeks to increase the number of students choosing to pursue graduate studies, and ultimately careers, in computer science. The participants experience the most compelling aspects of graduate school in a ten week summer program. The program nurtures student interest in research by engaging students in the entire research process, beginning with a search of the literature, reading prior research, selecting the specific problems to be studied, working on those problems, and preparing the results for publication. The program develops research skills and improves written and oral communication skills in order to prepare students for success in graduate school.
The research topics fall under the broadly scoped area of computer systems. Topics include computer networking, robot vision, computer music systems, and memory management, among others. Each project involves two or three students under the close direction of a faculty adviser whose expertise is in that area. In addition, students participate in a number of whole-group curricular and co-curricular activities. Among these activities are workshops on research methods, ethics, applying to graduate schools, careers in computer science, and technical topics.
This program seeks to involve students from a variety of backgrounds and particularly those from schools with limited access to research opportunities. The project includes a comprehensive local and national recruiting-outreach program.
The Harvey Mudd College REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) site in Computer Systems involved 30 undergraduate students in research experiences between 2008 and 2011. The objective of this site was to provide U.S. undergraduates with real research experiences in order to encourage students to consider careers in computing research. Students worked in small teams on one of several research problems described below: 1. Computer vision for autonomous robotics. In this project, students developed, implemented, and tested techniques that allow robots to autonomously navigate in unfamiliar environments. Using images captured by the robot's cameras, the robots were able to build maps of their environments and ultimately determine their locations in those maps. This work has a wide variety of possible applications including robotic search and rescue, among others. 2. Computer music. In this project, students developed and implemented algorithms for a computer music educational software system called Impro-Visor. Impro-Visor endeavors to help jazz musicians learn to become better improvisors. This project employed techniques in artificial intelligence and the theory of computing. The software is available to the public at www.cs.hmc.edu/~keller/jazz/improvisor 3. Memory management and garbage collection. Many modern programming languages use a technique called "garbage collection" to use the computer's memory efficiently. Current garbage collectors do not always work and this research strives to determine where and why they fail. In addition, there are opportunities to enhance the features of garbage collectors and this research explores some of those areas. 4. Computational biology and coevolution. Biologists often need to explore whether two species have evolved in tandem. For example, a parasite species may have evolved to specialize to its host. Determining whether or not such coevolution occured and, if so, how it occured requires mathematical, statistical, and computational methods. This research developed and implemented algorithms for studying coevolution. These tools are useful to evolutionary biologists, parasitologists, immunologists, and others. The software developed in this project is available to the public at www.cs.hmc.edu/~hadas/jane.
