Institution: University of Southern California
REU Site: Coordination, Communication, Autonomy: Principles and Technologies
PI: Gaurav S. Sukhatme Institution: University of Southern California
The objective of this REU site is to train students in research methodology and to enthuse them about Computer Science research. The intended impact is that a signicant proportion of the students go on to graduate school. Students will work with faculty mentors and their graduate students at the Computer Science department at the University of Southern California. A training program in ethics is planned as are three external research visits to local research labs in the Los Angeles area. A vibrant social program is planned to facilitate a sense of community wherein students will interact with participants in summer internship programs on the USC campus. A formal assessment of outcomes is planned via a principled and rigorous site evaluation program. The participating faculty mentors are well established in their fields and span a spectrum of cutting edge research topics in Computer Science.
Students participating in the program will have a chance to work on projects spanning robotics, agents and artificial intelligence, networks and systems, algorithms and modeling, and software engineering. Within robotics, projects are available in the newly emerging societally relevant area of robotics for healthcare and at- risk populations, networked robotics for scientic discovery covering water and air pollution monitoring, and humanoid robotics. Agents and artificial intelligence projects span multi-agent systems, planning and learning. Networking and systems projects include networked sensing and its use in scientic applications, scalable and robust routing infrastructures in large networks such as the Internet, data dissemination in wireless sensor networks, structural properties of the Internet and high level abstractions and analytical models. Within algorithms and modeling, students may work on graph algorithms, applications to networks, randomized algorithms, and information flow through networks. Finally, projects are available in software architecture modeling and analysis for embedded systems, middleware facilities for architectural implementation and software reliability modeling.
We are especially interesting in attracting participation in the USC Computer Science REU site from three populations: 1. academically talented students from traditionally underserved colleges and universities, 2. women, and 3. underrepresented minorities.
