UROP Research Opportunities
The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) cultivates and supports research partnerships between MIT undergraduates and faculty. If you have any questions please contact merriman@csail.mit.edu or take a look at the How to UROP at CSAIL document (pdf format).
This program is available to MIT students only.
Feel free to join us at our Summer 2009 UROP meeting to be held on Tuesday April 7, 2009 from 3:30PM - 5:00PM in Patil/Kiva conference room (32-G449) Any questions, feel free to email Johm Merriman at merriman@csail.mit.edu.
Agile Robotics: Autonomous Forklift
UROPs needed to help with mechanical, electrical, software, and/or testing tasks involved in development of a full-size robotic forklift intended for outdoor use. In your application, please list your relevant skills or experience in any of the areas above.
See Agile Robotics for more info.
Contact:
Seth Teller (teller@csail.mit.edu)
Bioinformatics UROP
Project Description: At this time, we have an opening for research UROP. This project involves work under faculty/staff affiliated with MIT/Harvard's HST division as well as CSAIL and the recently established National Center for Biomedical Computing named I2B2. As one of 2 national established NIH-funded centers for Bioinformatics in 2005, the $20 million I2B2 has new high-tech facilities and computational resources (http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/07/03/harvard_pro ject_to_scan_millions_of_medical_files/?page=full). You can check out the research areas and facilities at: http://www.i2b2.org/ and http://www.hpcgg.org/about.jsp?name=abouthpcgg. Areas of current focus include proteomics, networks, and evolution. We are based in Harvard Medical's new $265 million r! esearch building that opened recently-at the medical school campus ten minutes by M2 shuttle from MIT http://www.hms.harvard.edu/news/releases/0903nrb.html. There is also an office space at MIT where we can have meetings. The research project involves work on biomolecular and knowledge networks, an emerging ares within bioinformatics. Specifically, we are looking at learning new knowledge (applicable to diseases) from large, interconnected biological datasets. Some features of this particular UROP include: - Potential for a high-impact publication by the end of the UROP (previous students alums have won national awards and have been accepted to top graduate/medical programs including Harvard MD/PhD). - Networking at Harvard Medical School community via lab meetings, journal club, seminars, etc. - A self-contained project that can be done within a semester or two- but also has room for expansion for the ambitious student. - Flexible work hours - Independence (can be ! a plus or minus- i.e. student must be highly motivated and put! in the time to be successful). - Flexible work location (desk space will be available at New Research Building with the rest of the group as well). Many students work at MIT (Mentor has location at MIT as well). - Flexible start/end dates Please note that this opportunity may be either for-credit, experience, or MIT-sponsored funding (Note: deadline is soon).
Prerequisites: There is an opportunity that requires *strong programming skills* (CS, engineering, math, and/or physics background a plus) and a different one that is geared more toward biologists/pre-med. You will have a chance to work with Dr. Alterovitz under Prof. Ramoni. You can check out some related (but earlier) work at: http://bcl.med.harvard.edu and www.mit.edu/~gil.
Contact:
Please send a CV to Gil Alterovitz (gil@mit.edu) if you are interested.
Biological Network Analysis
UROP opening for highly motivated student to investigate biological networks. Student will be involved in designing and developing new methods for biological network analysis. Student should be able to work relatively independently. Work involves Harvard Medical School/MIT collaboration.
Prerequisites: Very strong Java background and knowledge of algorithm design.
Contact:
gil @ csail dot mit edu
Census: Location-aware membership management for large-scale distributed systems
Census is a new platform for building large-scale distributed applications. It provides a membership service that allows all nodes in the system to have a consistent view of system membership. It also provides a novel multicast mechanism that takes advantage of membership information to build highly reliable and efficient multicast trees. Census uses these trees to propagate membership information and also application-supplied information. The UROP project involves developing a publicly available implementation of Census and analyzing its performance.
Contact:
Interested students should contact Professor Barbara Liskov - liskov@csail.mit.edu
Computer Supported Programming Group
The computer supported programming group works on the next generation of programming systems. We are looking for undergraduates with experience in web programming to help develop a web-based infrastructure to evaluate new programming models. The goal is to be able to conduct user studies over the web to study how programmers interact with new programming models, and how design decisions in a programming language affect productivity. We are also looking for students who have taken 6.035 or who have experience in compiler construction to help with the development of the SKETCH synthesis system.
Contact:
Interested students should send e-mail to Armando Solar-Lezama - asolar@csail.mit.edu
Develop a global positioning system using position-aware pots
Currently, robots navigate by dead-reckoning and correct for odometry error once they arrive at a specific plant. We are interested in improving the system by providing the robots with a global position update once they arrive at the pots. For this, we are planning to encode the global position of each plant into the signal emitted by each pot. This will allow them to re-plan in case a navigation error occurred.
This project will require basic knowledge or willingness to learn microprocessor programming, C, and basic electronics.
Contact:
Daniela Rus(rus@csail.mit.edu) and Nikolaus Correll (nikolaus@csail.mit.edu)
Design of a robot gardening platform
The current system consists of a iRobot Create, an arm and a notebook computer, which are each powered by a separate battery. This prevents the robots from continuous operation as only the robot battery can be recharged autonomously (by driving up to the docking station). We are now interested in redesigning the existing system such that all of the robot’s modules are powered by a single power source. For this, the notebook computer currently being used needs to be replaced by an embedded platform (e.g. PC104), the original iRobot battery needs to be replaced by a more powerful one, and the charging circuit might need to be adapted.
This project requires basic knowledge or willingness to learn Solidworks, basic electronics and Linux.
Contact:
Daniela Rus(rus@csail.mit.edu) and Nikolaus Correll (nikolaus@csail.mit.edu)
Feature-based object recognition for objects that do not have features.
Tomatoes are currently recognized using a feature based approach. In a learning step a set of features are trained that are reliable indicators of the object that needs to be found in the image. In a convolution step unknown images are convoluted with each individual feature, which then “vote” for the object location in the image. It turns out that this approach works well for objects that have distinguished features or textures but less so if distinctive features are rather part of the background than the actual image – as it is the case for tomatoes. We would thus like to extend the current algorithm to better cope with this particular type of objects.
This project requires solid programming skills in Matlab and C and a good understanding of mathematical concepts such as convolution and probability. Experience with OpenCV is advantageous, but can be acquired during the project.
Contact:
Daniela Rus(rus@csail.mit.edu) and Nikolaus Correll (nikolaus@csail.mit.edu)
Haystack Project
The Haystack Group develops tools to help people better manage the information they deal with every day. Using methods from Databases, Machine Learning, and Human Computer Interaction, we develop a variety of tools to help people find, organize, author, publish, and share information. We build tools for the desktop and for the web. Some of our more successful projects have been list.it (http://listit.csail.mit.edu/), a firefox plugin for managing "information scraps" that is being used by over 10,000 people; the "SIMILE Timeline" which helps people present temporal information on their web pages, and can be found on the Obama recovery site (http://www.recovery.gov/); and Exhibit, a tool that lets people create rich interactive information visualizations on their web pages, involving maps, graphs, thumbnail grid, and assorted filters, all without doing any programming. Exhibit has been adopted by several newspapers (e.g. http://www.sfgate.com/maps/foreclosures/) for online articles, and was recently featured on lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com/5192486/exhibit-transforms-your-spreadsheet-into-a...). If you are excited about building cool tools that make it easier for people to manage information, we have work for you.
You can find out more about the group and its projects at http://haystack.csail.mit.edu/
Contact:
Applicants should email David Karger (karger@csail.mit.edu)
Human-Computer Collaboration in Multi-UAV Supervision
We are looking for an undergraduate student to participate in the data collection and analysis phase of our Human-Computer Collaboration in Multi-UAV Supervision experiment. The job will include working with advanced Java and Matlab interfaces, importing, converting and analyzing data, and creating associated visualizations.
Requirements: Experience with Java and Matlab programming required. Experience with statistics required. Experience with SPSS a plus.
Contact:
Mary (Missy) Cummings (missyc@csail.mit.edu)
Information Access using Natural Language
The InfoLab group at CSAIL seeks students to work on the START question answering system, http://start.csail.mit.edu, which provides advanced access to information on the Web and in other databases via natural language. Knowledge of Scheme, Java, SQL, regular expressions, and basic linguistics is helpful but not required. Students will find and integrate new knowledge sources into the system, and update existing systems, immediately affecting the behavior of START as used by millions of people around the world.
Further research opportunities are available in large-scale corpus-based Question Answering, Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, and general Natural Language Processing
Contact:
Boris Katz (boris@mit.edu)
LabelMe video project: A web-based video annotation tool
Massive amounts of image and video are produced everyday. However, it is still a challenge to create systems capable of automatically parsing such media rich content. Computer vision research greatly depends on labeled data to train models for object, event, and scene detection. We have developed a website dedicated for labeling video data. The UROP project involves developing key features to enhance the user experience of our web tool. Example projects include, but are not limited to developing a logging and account system on top of pre-existing code for both client and server layers. Must have programming experience (preferably in web applications) and work well with others in a team. Knowledge of Perl/Python, Javascript, and/or Adobe Flex are preferred but not required.
Contact:
Jenny Yuen (jenny@csail.mit.edu), Antonio Torralba (torralba@csail.mit.edu)
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
The Center for Collective Intelligence (http://cci.mit.edu) is focused on answering the question, How can people and computers be connected so that- collectively-they act more intelligently than any person, group, or computer has ever done before? The Center includes faculty from around MIT, including CSAIL, Media Lab, and Sloan. We expect to have opportunities for summer jobs, MEng, UROP, or other student work on several projects. For example, two current projects are: (a) a project to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people around the world to address global climate change (see http://cci.mit.edu/research/climate.html) and (b) a project to combine human and machine intelligence in flexible new ways to make accurate predictions about future events such as product sales, political events, and outcomes of medical treatments (see http://cci.mit.edu/research/prediction.html).
Contact:
Thomas Malone (malone@mit.edu), Randall Davis (davis@csail.mit.edu), or Peter Szolovits (psz@mit.edu).
Online Data Integration Using Semantic Web technologies
Project Description: The Semantic Web is a powerful distributed model for publishing, utilizing, and extending information and is sometimes referred to as Web 3.0. It provides several enabling technologies and protocols such Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema (RDF-S), SPARQL Query Language. These technologies have led to online Semantic Web data sources whose contents can be “mashed-up'' (i.e. queried and integrated on-the-fly) to provide rich Web applications. However, the user or application developer still needs to know exactly what data is present in each source and needs to formulate queries carefully in order to get a reply. When the content of a source changes, mashups/users cannot take advantage of it until the application developer becomes aware of this change and modifies the application/query accordingly. In order to allow users to dynamically explore this space by asking open ended queries, we intend to use the federation paradigm from database systems, where federated data sources collaboratively attempt to solve a user's query. In this project, the student will learn about and use Semantic Web technologies, study some SPARQL federation proposals, extend or develop a federation protocol, and implement a test-bed. A successfully implemented project could lead to support and/or an MEng in the Fall.
Prerequisites: Knowledge of database systems, RDF, and SPARQL is useful but not essential. Ability to program (in python preferably) is required.
Contact:
Please send your resume to Lalana Kagal at http://csail.mit.edu/~lkagal/contact.html
Speech-based interfaces
The Spoken Language Systems group (http://www.sls.csail.mit.edu) seeks UROPs to help develop speech-based user interfaces. Opportunities for activities include web-based speech and pen interaction, mobile devices, kiosks, and vehicle environments.
Qualifications (depending on project)
* Linux, Python, PyGTK experience
* iPhone/Mac OS X development experience
* Java, Javascript, HTML, J2EE experience
* Linux, MATLAB, signal processing experience
Contact:
Applicants should contact Jim Glass (glass@mit.edu)
The Program Analysis Group
The Program Analysis Group (PAG) has a number of projects at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/pag/pag/projects/. (Note: This URL is only accessible from the mit.edu domain.)
PAG's research aims to make software more reliable, more secure, and easier (and more fun!) to produce. Our work includes software engineering, static and dynamic program analysis, testing, security, type theory, programming language design, and verification. If you like building software, you will enjoy this research, which is about making programming less error-prone, less tedious, and more fun. If you ever have trouble building software, you will find the research results helpful, and you may be inspired to come up with new projects.
New 2008 Project Titles include: Validating bug reports, Automatically creating environments for software model checking, Preventing bugs with pluggable type-checking for Java, Mutation testing: How good is your test suite?, Run-time checker for Java specifications, Example Oriented (Java) API Document Generator, Detecting Whether a Software Upgrade Was Successfull, Retrofitting Parallelism into Existing Sequential Code, Refactoring-aware Version Control System, Dynamic Analysis Toolkit for Java Programs, Scalable data flow analysis for Java, C/C++ dynamic analysis tools, Generating specifications in practice, Concolic Testing Engine for NASA JavaPathFinder, Cross-Testing using a Software Model Checker, Grammar-based Whitebox Fuzzing for Java, An Ethnographic Study of Obsolete Test Suites, and Grammar constraint solver. Please visit the PAG website for more information.
PAG does the best MEng research in CSAIL! An MEng thesis from PAG has won the Charles and Jennifer Johnson Thesis Award (for outstanding computer science M.Eng. thesis) in 4 of the last 6 years: 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007.
Visual Servoing and Inverse Kinematics.
Visual servoing is the problem of calculating the motion of a robot’s endeffector as a function of an image seen by a camera. The inverse kinematics are the equations that then describe how an endeffector’s motion translates from Cartesian space to the control parameters of the robot arm (e.g. joint angles). Currently these two processes are implemented in two discrete modules, one of which is OpenRAVE a modular inverse kinematic solver and 3D simulator developed at CMU. The aim of this project is to implement the visual servoing part as a module in OpenRAVE to improve the overall robustness and performance of the solution.
This project requires advanced programming skills in C++ and solid knowledge of linear algebra.
Contact:
Daniela Rus(rus@csail.mit.edu) and Nikolaus Correll (nikolaus@csail.mit.edu)
