Undergraduate research is a great way to earn experience towards a full-time job or post graduate studies. Listed below are a few of the opportunities currently available in the department.
Information assurance (security) is considered so important to our national defense that a formal DoD IASP was established by the National Defense Authorization Act for 2001 (Public Law 106-398). The purpose is to promote the education, recruitment, and retention of rising junior and senior undergraduate and graduate students in information assurance studies and of students seeking graduate certificates in information assurance disciplines.
The DoD is seeking rising junior and senior undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in full-ride scholarships for concentrated studies in information assurance. Students selected for the program will receive full scholarships. This requires the student to agree to serve one year of service to the DoD, upon graduation, for each year of scholarship received. An opportunity also exists for scholarship payback through military service.
During breaks in their academic studies, Information Assurance Scholars will receive progressive, hands-on experience in information security internships.
Full-ride scholarship plus up to $14,000 stipend.
Dr. Bruce McMillin
A letter grade of 'A' in CS 253
The student will work with a Ph.D. student to update SPIN as follows. The SPIN model checker parses a PROMELA model of a concurrent program and produces source files (pan.[bchmt]) which can be compiled and run (without any additional input) to verify certain properties of the model which was the input for SPIN. Because the source code for SPIN itself is available, we hope to modify it to produce an alternate version of the pan.[bchmt] files in order to implement a geometric optimization procedure and hopefully improve the complexity (especially runtime) of the verification. This will involve transforming the transition tables (to better represent the geometry of the flow graphs of the processes comprising the model) which a function in pan.t produces. Another task will be to write a function to partition the progress graphs which represent the state space of each pair of processes. Next, the most complicated part of the modification to SPIN is to modify the way that the depth-first search explores the state space of all processes (not just pairs), making sure to record new states correctly on-the-fly (in a hash table, probably). As the various programming tasks are accomplished, we will want to test them for correctness with example PROMELA models. The programming will involve pointers, linked lists, and will need to be done in C, not C++. Although we have worked out the general idea for algorithms for these tasks, some of the specifics are a little fuzzy still, but hopefully the need to rework the design will be minimal, and we'll get it nearly right on the first try. At some point, it might be nice also to have a testing program written to invoke our work and measure the runtime as compared to the original version of SPIN.
Part-time pay is available during the regular school semesters (fall and spring). Full-time pay is available during the summer.
Dr. Bruce McMillin
Good academic aptitude supported by GPA scores, and/or relevant experience. All students must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
The main aim of this REU site proposal is to train undergraduate students from Computer Science in the area of wireless sensor computing. The development of effective strategies to handle potential threats to civilian infrastructure and for other applications relies on sensor computing. The reliability, security, and accuracy of these sensor data and wireless devices can affect timely access to information for decision-making. Limitations such as node power, signal propagation delay, and memory within sensor nodes are to be taken into consideration in the computing networking architecture. The students will be exposed to this new exciting area by means of systems, experimental and applications aspects of sensor computing and networking. They will be able to identify the key challenges in realizing such a network. By doing so, students will learn fundamental technology and techniques behind sensor computing to have a good grasp of current and emerging sensor networking applications such as monitoring nation's critical infrastructures and health-care monitoring.
Only available in the summer. The project will cover the reasonable expenses for travel, boarding, and food cost and will pay a stipend of around $400 per week.
Dr. Sanjay Madria
Varies
The OURE program is sponsored by the Undergraduate Studies office. The goal is to match your interests with the interests of a professor who may not already have the resources to support you. OUREs are very flexible and often lead to more research opportunities that have better funding and compensation. Students who take OUREs often pair them with CS390 coursework. This allows the OURE student to receive class credit for their research.
OURE students are compensated once after being selected for the opportunity. Then again at the completion of their work.
Matt Buechler
