REU Site: Research Experience for Undergraduates in Computer Vision

The University Of Central Florida Board Of Trustees, Orlando FL

Investigators

Abstract

This project represents a continuation of a Research Experience for Undergraduates site in Computer Vision which has operated successfully at the University of Central Florida for the past twenty four years. Approximately two hundred and forty undergraduate students from forty-five institutions all over the country have participated in this program over the years. The research focus area is Computer Vision. The current proposal is to have 10 participants per year, for three years. Each year, students will participate in a 12-week duration full-time Summer program. From lessons learned in prior years, the proposed model includes round-the-clock mentoring by a team that includes a professor, and a post-doctoral fellow or a graduate student; a streamlined short course that lets participants start their research projects sooner; daily meetings with mentors to plan activities throughout the day; training in MatLab for quick turnaround of research ideas. Participants take the short course, match themselves to a project topic that they most desire, and spend sufficient time in focused research. They then can opt for follow-through over the year by working with the professors to write a technical report on their project, to prepare for the GREs and to apply to graduate programs. In past years, a substantial fraction of our REU participants have been able to prepare a paper for submission to a refereed conference, have the paper accepted and then attend the conference to present the paper.