Undergraduate Research Opportunities Available

Gaining real hands-on experience as an undergraduate student is invaluable and can enhance your academic career both in and out of the classroom, and CS is launching a new undergraduate research experience that can help you do just that. The Promoting Undergraduate Research in ECE, otherwise known as PURE is a student initiative that aims at facilitating undergraduate research for underclassmen. But don’t let the name fool you: PURE is not just for ECE students anymore, but for CS students as well. This experience is geared towards freshmen and sophomores who are interested in being matched with a graduate student mentor to work on research projects in labs on the University of Illinois campus.

The possibilities available to students involved in this program are endless. Undergraduate research projects from previous years include designing the next generation of search engines, probabilistic modeling in Scrabble, linking Twitter activity’s reflection in market events, and much more.

Past PURE participants created vertical search engines which allows web users to search specific objects on the web rather than on web pages alone. This group studied the interfaces of ten vertical search engines and used their findings to derive several valuable lessons for object-oriented search engine design- essentially changing the way we can search the Web.

Others used their research to change the way Scrabble is played on computers. Computers have long since surpassed the level of human play in competitive Scrabble, so these students created a probabilistic model that allowed humans to play against computer players of varying strengths where the variation between levels became more natural and human-like. However their work was much more important than Scrabble, the models that these students developed can also be of great use on other data sets, and to researchers in other fields as well.

Undergraduate researchers in the PURE initiative were also able to find a link between Twitter activity and its reflection in market events. Access to financial information is costly and this student based research proved that the comments market traders posted on companies’ Twitter accounts has a direct correlation with trading activity. Who knew Twitter could lead to that level of market insight?

You too can participate in this problem-solving research by becoming a PURE participant. There will be an information session on Monday, August 30 from 6:00-7:00 pm Wednesday, September 1 at 6:30 (UPDATED day and time) in 2405 Siebel Center. This session will provide interested students with more information and will answer any questions you may have.