REU Site: Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) at Illinois Tech

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The Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program at Illinois Tech engages ten undergraduates, three faculty mentors, and three graduate students for this ten week program for each of 3 years to study research topics in computational mathematics and machine learning. SURE students are embedded in existing, active research groups where they acquire both technical as well as communication and teamwork skills. SURE makes a concerted effort to diversify the research environment by targeting female and underrepresented minority students and students from academic institutions with limited research opportunities. The program is designed to prepare SURE students for graduate study in mathematics, statistics, or related fields in preparation for research careers in academia or industry. The SURE program promotes advanced training in STEM disciplines. The student-centered learning-research modules enhance participants’ knowledge of mathematics and statistics and develop their capabilities in conducting independent research. SURE students explore real-world research challenges and learn to pose questions, collect preliminary findings, modify their questions as necessary, and pursue answers. SURE students learn to be effective in communication, teamwork, professionalism, and responsibility. SURE engages in a wide range of computational mathematics and machine learning topics, including i) building and applying energetic variational inference algorithms, ii) developing code for pattern formation models in physical and biological systems, iii) assessing models for scoring environment, sustainability, and government risk factors in finance, and iv) identifying novel sampling methods and stopping criteria for Monte Carlo simulations. During the summer, SURE participants present their work bi-weekly and receive feedback from each other and their faculty and graduate student mentors. The summer program concludes with a poster day where students present their research to the Illinois Tech community.This 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.