Applications are now welcome from undergraduate students at all levels (US Citizens, Permanent Residents) to be selected for a 10-week NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates Traineeship held from May 31, 2024, till August 2nd, 2024. The traineeship will be offered at the campus of the University of Utah, in the Kahlert School of Computing, located near the majestic Wasatch Mountain ranges. The application deadline is March 22, 2024, and we expect to fund only about 10 REUs. The selected students will earn a stipend of $7,200 for this period, and will additionally be compensated for airfare, room and board.
We will introduce our trainees to the basics of many exciting and crucially important computer science research areas such as High Performance Computing, Machine Learning, and Wireless Networking. The emphasis is on hands-on demonstrations of these technologies, and how trust and reproducibility are enhanced in these areas.
This opportunity is open to students early in their undergraduate career, and no research experience is required. We encourage applications from students in populations underrepresented in computer science research, including women, persons with disabilities, Blacks and African Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Other Pacific Islanders.
APPLY HERE.
We will introduce the basics of High-performance Computing (HPC), including how numerical algorithms are specified conveniently using Jupyter notebooks and submitted for execution on supercomputers. Our guided approach will help you start a day not knowing anything about HPC and end that day having submitted, run and gathered your first HPC simulation results!
We will introduce our trainees to the process of classifying images using machine learning (ML). The trainees will use state-of-the-art ML training systems that are driven by Jupyter notebook-based scripts in order to achieve acceptable levels of classification accuracy. Our guided approach will help you start a day not knowing anything about ML and end that day having trained a Neural Network to classify (say) X-Ray images with prescribed accuracy targets.
We will demonstrate advanced wireless networking in the context of Utah’s POWDER project. Our approach will help you quickly learn how software-defined radios work. You will be guided through the process of collecting data from our on-campus shuttle buses as to their locations.
Cohort activities will interweave themes not usually part of undergraduate programs: Ethics, Inclusion, and Research Training. The REU participants will meet as a cohort for training on these specific topics, and REU participants will work with their faculty mentors one-on-one to put those topics into practice in their individual projects
Optional Social Activities. These include nearby hikes (e.g., Ensign Peak), rock-climbing wall at the Eccles Student Life Center, visits to the campus Natural History Museum, and inexpensive local events such as the Latino Arts Festival and the Twilight Outdoor Concert Series.
In a broader sense, HPC is fundamental to grand-challenge issues ranging from Climate Research to Fighting Pandemics. ML plays a pivotal role in our day-to-day lives including in Medical Diagnosis from MRI Images all the way to Self-Driving Cars. ML also reduces or eliminates hours of HPC simulations by taking decisions based on data rather than laborious computations. Computer Networking is fundamental to the connected society. It also enables smart devices that will be in our pockets or in our cars to ``talk to each other.’’ We will introduce the trainees to methods that enhance the security and integrity of the communicated data.
The training imparted will cover not only in the aforesaid technical priority areas but also many ancillary areas including ethics, inclusivity, and microaggression management. There will be plenty of hands-on research projects, cohort-building activities, and (last but not least) fun social activities.
Activities in this REU site are sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) whose mission is to train tomorrow’s workforce in areas such as covered by this REU site.
For additional questions, please email reu-site-utah-ksoc@googlegroups.com (kindly do not send-in any personal information other than through the above site, and unless requested). There are also instructions provided at our REU Site: Trust and Reproducibility of Intelligent Computation listed within the NSF ETAP Portal.
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