REU Site: CAAR: Combinatorics, Algorithms, and AI Applied to Real Problems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This renewal REU Site program will recruit 10 undergraduate students to come to the University of Maryland at College Park where they will work for 10 weeks on team research projects with mentors. The students will be offered a variety of research projects and will also be given a strong voice in the creation of their own projects. Several will develop new techniques and analyses of machine learning (ML) systems, which use probability and statistics to find patterns in data. Others will use cryptography to build secure systems. Research projects in following topical areas will be offered: Cryptography and Security; Fair Allocation; Trustworthy Machine Learning; and Neural Networks and Finance. These projects broadly focus on combining theory and practice and students attending the program will leave it with the ability to look at a real world problem and apply theoretical techniques to solving it. There will be a special effort to recruit students in the program from non-research-focused schools and from traditionally underrepresented groups. The PIs plan several recruiting trips (in person or on zoom) to such schools to attract such students. This program will give many of the students a chance to do research, which they otherwise would not have. This program will prepare all of the students for graduate school. Social activities include trips, hikes, panel discussions about professional development, and other planned interactions with other REU students, current graduate students, and facultyThis award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.