The Computer Science Departments of the College of Staten Island and Hunter College recently completed the second 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 undergraduate students from universities across the United States, 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 such as Minority Serving Institutions.

This summer’s students were: Jason Liao (CSI-Macaulay) , Alondra Camacho (CSI-Macaulay), Ilir Kransniqi (CSI),  Seungho  Lee (Princeton), Michael Yakhontov (Brown), Srishti Bakshi (University of Washington), and  Joey Tam (Rochester Institute of Technology). These students were selected among hundreds of applicants from US academic institutions.

Students were mentored by faculty from across CUNY, including Tushar Jois (City College), Lei Xie (Hunter, and Co-PI), You Wo (Hunter), and Louis Petingi, Sos Agaian, Vladimir Frants, Shuqun Zhang, 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 Computational Biology based on Graph-Theory.

The REU Site is 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 of the students’ Research Presentations.