Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the REU Site provided nine undergrads with deep study into various research fields of computer science

The Computer Science Departments of the College of Staten Island and Hunter College recently completed the first of a three-year summer program supporting a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site in an area of increasing national importance: Computational Methods in High Performance Computing with Applications to Computational Sciences.

Held each summer at the College of Staten Island, the goal of the REU Site each year is to recruit nine undergraduate students for a nine-week summer experience. These students undertake challenging problems with their mentors in various research fields of computer science and related areas such as Computational Vision, Computational Biology and Chemistry, Cyber Security, Deep and Machine Learning, Sensor Networks, Complex System Modeling and Simulation, and other areas that require parallel processing programming techniques to be solved. Emphasis is placed on recruiting students from colleges and universities that offer limited STEM research opportunities, such as Minority Serving Institutions.

This summer’s students were: Kerolos Assad, Tasnim Hanaif, and Michael Loren from CSI, Kristen Aloysius from CCNY, Yunus Bolat from Colorado College, Vincent Chen from Lehigh University, Brian Rettig from Haverford College, Ana Stanisavljevic from Duke University, and Kenny Sun from Clemson University.

Students were mentored by faculty from across CUNY, including Tushar Jois (City College), Lei Wei (Hunter), Yu-Wen Chen (NYC College of Technology), and Louis Petingi, Sos Agaian, Vladimir Frants, and Zhanyang Zhang from the College of Staten Island. The research areas covered by this year’s program included Cryptography (Network-Security), Image Processing, Machine and Deep Learning in Computational Biology-Medicine, and Electrical Vehicles Charging Scheduling Algorithms. The High-Performance Computing component was based on Amazon AWS Cloud, as well as utilizing GPU clusters from the mentors’ home institutions. Jonathan Parziale was responsible for setting up the Amazon AWS cluster environment.

The REU Site is the a result of a three-year National Science Foundation award, of which Petingi is the Principal Investigator.

To see more about the amazing work done by the REU Site, visit their Website.

See more photos taken at the REU Site’s Farewell Party last week.