REU Site: Undergraduate Research on Artificial Intelligence and Text Analysis

Siena University, Loudonville NY

Investigators

Abstract

The Siena College Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site provides unique opportunities for undergraduates to develop research expertise in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Siena College REU Site environment fosters learning through research by means of faculty advisors and peer mentors. The students work in teams on real problems in information extraction in areas such as information gathering for military and security needs to targeted marketing of products. Especially due to the emerging area of Big Data, this REU program is having an impact on applications that address national and global societal problems, such as medical information retrieval systems that identify people for clinical trials and systems to predict the focus of a groups with adverse intentions from automated text analysis. Teams working in these areas need to have diversity in skills, knowledge, and cultural perspectives, and the Siena REU program is recruiting a wide range of students, including a focus on women and other under-represented groups, so that the students can gain the broad experience needed to address the big problems in today's society. The REU students are involved in research teams with Siena College faculty and student mentors working on projects that are conducted at the Siena College Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SCIAI) in computational linguistics (CL) for information extraction. The projects are improving the state of the art in CL, as well as investigating interesting real-world applications. Students are learning about the nature of scientific research and how to communicate their work in student-authored publications and through presentations at research conferences. The results of the students' work, including transcripts of presentations and copies of posters, are disseminated via the Siena College REU Site website (http://www.siena.edu/reu).