REU Site: Undergraduate Research Experience in Multimedia Data Analytics

University Of Houston, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

The REU site in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Houston (UH) introduces undergraduate students to Computational Data Analytics, an area of increasing national importance. Student research projects include Bioinformatics, Face Recognition, Computer Vision, Computational Physiology, Computational Cytometry, and Information Extraction for Financial Data. Ten students are selected in each of the three years of the program. The student recruitment plan actively encourages students from colleges and universities that offer limited research opportunities, such as historically black colleges and universities. Emphasis is on attracting female students and underrepresented minorities. The University of Houston is a comprehensive research university, a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), and one of the most ethnically diverse in the nation. The REU Site program strives to attract non-traditional students into research, reinforce their interest in computer science, retain these students in their academic programs, and prepare them for graduate school. Results of the research conducted at the REU Site program will be disseminated through discipline-appropriate publications. The REU Site program has four main objectives: (1) Students will develop competency in scientific research, presentation, and writing skills. (2) Participants will produce meaningful research results during their summer program. These results will be written up in a format that is acceptable for publication in an appropriate conference or journal. (3) Participants will sustain and increase their interest in research careers after their on-campus summer through continuing contacts and research participation, and delivery of a presentation on their research. (4) Participants will learn to present and disseminate their research results. The activities aimed at achieving the main objectives are integrated with student cohort activities, including site visits to cutting-edge research laboratories, seminars on career development, ethics in computer science, methods of literature search, and practical advice on questions related to graduate school. The goal is to make a lasting impact beyond the 10 weeks the students spend at the REU Site. The success of the program will be continuously evaluated through student and faculty questionnaires, and by an education professor, and this feedback will be used to improve the program in operation. The program maintains a website (http://www.cs.uh.edu/reu/) that supports the application and evaluation process and informs future, current, and past participants about deadlines and decisions, events, and achievements of the people involved in it.