Undergrads Offered the Opportunity to Join Faculty Research During the UG Research Networking Lunch
This past May, twenty UT Dallas Computer Science Undergraduate students were invited to take part in the Computer Science/Software Engineering Undergraduate Research Speed Matching Luncheon. The event brought together both UT Dallas’s distinguished computer science and software engineering faculty members, current research students, and a select group of ambitious CS/SE undergraduate students. Students who attended this event were invited based on their GPA of 3.8 or higher. The event acted as an introduction to the Undergraduate Research course offered by the UT Dallas Computer Science Department.
The course aims to provide students with the necessary tools they will need when taking part in hands-on research projects. By taking part in the Undergraduate Research course, students enrolled in the course are provided with research opportunities not available to everyone. This includes attending conferences, doing research with UT Dallas CS faculty members, and having their work published. The students, supervised by faculty, develop the necessary and valuable skills that will help them succeed in their future professions as well as academic careers by providing them with opportunities where they can be challenged and have the opportunity to excel. Students also learn how to properly conduct research in many different settings including libraries and labs.
Students enrolled in this course are required to meet milestones and to make a presentation of their research at the end of the semester. In the course of this class, students are required to complete a research plan with their professors and teams, report their progress and findings on a weekly basis, and at the end of the course, make a detailed presentation of their research including a research poster to fellow students enrolled in the course. Through the entirety of the course, students become progressively more proficient when communicating their results.
In order to best prepare the undergraduate students for this course, Drs. Linda Morales and Janell Straach, both UT Dallas CS professors and the course’s supervising instructors, set up the matching event. The objective was to afford both CS and SE undergraduate students the opportunity to talk with multiple professors and research students with the objective of helping the students make an informed choice when choosing what research project and in which team they would like to participate.
In talking with professors and research students, the CS/SE undergraduate students learned more about the different types of research that are being conducted. In talking with CS/SE students who are already engaged with professors in their research labs, they gained valuable insight into their experience with the course from the perspective of students who are more advanced in the research process.
During the event, students were offered the opportunity to explore the following areas of research through direct and open dialogue with the UT Dallas faculty members:
- Cyber Security
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Data Science
- Computational Biology
- Theoretical Computer Science
- Computer and Telecommunication Topics
- Graph Theory
- Networking
- Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
- Automated Reasoning
- Intelligent Systems
Click here to view photos from the event.
ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 2,800 bachelors-degree students, more than 1,000 master’s students, 190 Ph.D. students, 52 tenure-track faculty members, and 41 full-time senior lecturers, as of Fall 2018. With The University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.