REU Site: Human Communication in a Connected World

这个本科生研究体验(REU)网站将提供智力和社会刺激的研究体验，涉及一系列充满活力和多样化的研究主题，重点是数字交流。在我们的日常生活中越来越多地使用互联网，需要进行研究来支持通信和信息科学的新趋势，需要教育来为年轻人在未来几十年从事有价值的职业做准备。参与该项目的学生将接受广泛的研究培训，并获得有关研究职业的有价值的信息，与顶尖教师合作解决令人兴奋的问题。每个学生将与一位导师合作，但将有许多联合活动来创造队列体验，并支持平行研究项目的交流，从而促进科学进步和学生学习。该网站由国防部与NSF REU计划合作支持。在数字连接的共同推力下，有四个主题，每个主题由一名研究导师领导：(1)通信主题专注于支持通信的硬件和基础设施，以新颖的方式解决带宽有限和协议设计受限的悬而未决的问题，提出光路由器、网络内计算和可扩展的协议设计。(2)网络安全主题侧重于确保通信不受网络攻击和破坏性活动(如网络欺凌和网络掠夺)的影响，寻求解决几个公开问题的解决方案，包括安全的恶意软件分析、大规模拒绝服务攻击、弱密码以及缺乏隐私安全的网络数据源。(3)信息检索主题侧重于从网上资源中挖掘有用的信息，利用强大的新概念，如抽象意义表示、通用语言翻译和诗歌结构，实现自然语言的理解和生成。(4)信息流主题专注于理解社会系统的结构和沟通动态，新的重点是认知因素及其对沟通的影响，这些因素已经发现了可以改变社交网络向用户呈现信息的方式以及人们利用众包的方式的现象。

This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site will offer an intellectually and socially stimulating research experience, on a vibrant and diverse set of research topics, focusing on digital communication. Increasing use of Internet in our daily lives requires research to support emerging trends in communication and information science, and education to prepare young people for rewarding careers in the decades to come. Students involved in the program will receive extensive training in research, and valuable information about research careers, working with top faculty on exciting problems. Each student will work with one mentor, but there will be many joint activities to create a cohort experience, and to support communication across parallel research projects, thereby enhancing scientific progress as well as student learning. This site is supported by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program.There are four themes, each led by one research mentor, under the common thrust of digital connectivity: (1) The communication theme focuses on hardware and infrastructure to support communication, tackling unsolved problems of limited bandwidth and constrained protocol design in novel ways, proposing optical routers, in-network computation and extensible protocol design. (2) The cybersecurity theme focuses on securing communication from cyberattacks and damaging activities such as cyberbullying and cyberpredation, seeking solutions for several open problems, including safe malware analysis, large denial-of-service attacks, weak passwords, and the lack of privacy-safe sources of network data. (3) The information retrieval theme focuses on mining useful information from online sources, to achieve natural-language understanding and generation, using powerful new constructs, such as Abstract Meaning Representation, universal language translation, and the structure of poetry. (4) The information flow theme focuses on understanding structure and communication dynamics of social systems with a novel focus on cognitive factors and their impact on communication that has already uncovered phenomena that can change the way social networks present information to users, and the way people leverage crowdsourcing.