RESEARCH EXPERIENCE FOR UNDERGRADUATES (REU) PROGRAM
http://www.cse.usf.edu/REU/

The Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program at the College of Engineering (CoE) was established by the Dean of the college in spring 2002 in response to local and nationwide trends regarding declining enrollment in engineering, undergraduate graduation rates, and enrollment in graduate programs. Currently, the program has a continuous enrollment of approximately 100 students. Current statistics say that 21% of the REU students come from minority groups, 27% are women, 37% of the students graduated, and 24% of them have already joined graduate school either at USF or at other institutions. This means that 64% of the participating students joined graduate school.

Program Description

Under the REU program, undergraduate students work very closely with a faculty mentor in a very well defined research problem for up to three consecutive semesters. Students are required to work 10 hours per week and receive a small stipend in return.
REU students have been involved in many different types of research endeavors in Chemical, Industrial and Management Systems, Civil and Environmental, Mechanical, Electrical, and Computer Science and Engineering. In our department, students have worked on several areas, such as:

• Computer vision, digital image processing, and patter recognition
• Robotics
• Location-based services, participatory sensing, human-centric sensing
• Energy-efficient networking
• Wireless sensor networks and mobile ad hoc networks
• Bioinformatics
• Software security
• Data mining
• Others

These and many other projects related to each of the engineering specialties available in college have challenged our undergraduate students and kept them motivated to continue working towards their degrees and joining graduate school. In addition to the college-wide REU program, our department is running a NSF-funded REU Site on Computer Science and Engineering for six consecutive summers (2005-2010) ( http://www.csee.usf.edu/REU/). University-wide, the newly created Office of Undergraduate Research runs an Annual REU Symposium, publishes the Journal of Undergraduate Research and provides grant opportunities for faculty and students involved in undergraduate research.