REU Sites: Renewal for the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University

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It is well known that exposure of undergraduates to research often leads to a positive decision about pursuing graduate degrees. Program such as the current REU Site grant in CS at TAMU have been very effective with increasing our numbers of women and minorities in our graduate program. For example, from the 2004 and 2005 REU site summer programs, 4 of the 16 REU students (or 25%) are enrolled in graduate programs at TAMU, of which 2 are women or minority. The objectives of the proposed renewal REU site are: (1) exposure of diverse undergraduates to exciting research in Computer Science with the goal of having the students pursue a graduate degree and (2) exposure of diverse undergraduates to a career as a faculty member. The computer science field lags behind in numbers of ethnic minorities and women in the graduate program. This project directly benefits these students by having a program that provides an opportunity for women and minorities, in particular, to participate in the research projects, be exposed to various role models, and form communities that can exist beyond the program. Each REU student will have a faculty advisor and a graduate student mentor. The research projects will focus on seven core areas that reflect the current expertise in the department: Foundations of Computing; Human-Centered Systems; Information; Intelligent Systems and Robotics; Software; Software Engineering and Systems. These areas are critical to emerging multi-disciplinary areas, such as bioinformatics, computational science, and humanities informatics. Students will have an opportunity to work in depth in the core area or with the application of the core area to an emerging, multi-disciplinary area.