RESEARCH EXPERIENCES FOR UNDERGRADUATES

Cultivating Next Generation Software Engineering Researchers

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OBJECTIVES

The "Cultivating Next Generation Software Engineering Researcher" REU site at RIT immerses a diverse group of talent undergraduates in a exciting community working on software engineering and computer-supported collaborative work. Building on the research of an experienced team of faculty mentors, the interdisciplinary program focuses on three main themes covering the entire software development life cycle: Developers' Productivity, Communication and Collaboration, and Design and Creativity.

10 students will participate in a ten-week summer research program (06/03/2020-08/09/2020). The project includes mentoring by the experienced faculty members, technical seminars and workshops, student presentations, field trips and other professional development opportunities. They will gain skills and hands on experience on: software development, machine learning, natural language process, user study, statistics, network theory, and so on. REU students present their work at a unversity-wide undergraduate research symposium, and are encouraged to submit their technical papers as peer reviewed publications.


PROGRAM

Impartant Dates

  • Application Deadline: 02/15/2020 or open until filled
  • Notification: 04/20/2020 (Early application receives early notification.)
  • Summer Program:
    • 06/03/2020: Arrive at RIT
    • 06/05/2020: Start of REU summer program
    • 08/01/2020: Undergraduate Research Symposium
    • 08/09/2020: Leave RIT

How to apply?

  • Submit your application to: https://forms.gle/zTyP2a565hL7GkK28
  • Please ask your references to send their letters of recommendation to: Dr. Mirakhorli via email (mxmvse - at - RIT - dot - edu)
  • If you have any further questions, please contact the any of the three mentors:
    • Dr. Mehdi Mirakhorli: mxmvse@rit.edu
    • Dr. Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer: mwmvse@rit.edu
    • Dr. Christian Newman: cdnvse@rit.edu

Benefits

  • Work with active and experienced research faculty on novel research projects.
  • Receive a $5,000 stipend ($500 per week), free housing, low-cost meal plan.
  • Each participating student will be provided with round-trip travel support to attend the program at RIT at a rate of $600/student each year.
  • Students are eligible to apply for funding to travel to a conference.
  • Enjoy various social events during the summer, and visit our industry partners. We will do a trip to Niagara Falls and other local attractions!
  • Gain career-relevant skills and make your resume more attractive.
  • Meet a lot of new friends!
  • And many others waiting for your exploration...
  • Photos from 2018 program: 2018 Photos!

Housing

  • Housing in the Residence Halls is covered in full under the REU program at no cost to participants. Recently, REU students have been housed in RIT's Global Village. This new dorm has a suite structure, with 5 rooms per suite, and a kitchen and bathroom in each suite.
  • RIT's Global Village is next to our building!
  • More about Global Village:
    https://www.rit.edu/fa/housing/housing-option/global-village

REQUIREMENTS

  • Applicant must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident of the United States.
  • Applicant must be and remain an undergraduate student in good standing.
  • Applicant must plan to complete a degree program.
  • Students must give a written report and poster presentation of work performed at the REU Site.
  • Students may participate in Computing REU programs at RIT a maximum of two summers.
  • Students from Social Science majors are encouraged to apply.

PROJECT MENTORS

Dr. Mehdi Mirakhorli

Dr. Mehdi Mirakhorli is an assistant professor in the Department of Software Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He will be the leading mentor for the REU projects related to Developer's Productivity

Dr. Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

Dr. Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer is an assistant professor in the Department of Software Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He will be the leading mentor for the REU projects related to Software Maintenance and Evolution.

Dr. Christian Newman

Dr. Christian Newman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Software Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He will be the leading mentor for the REU projects related to Software and Program Comprehension.


PROJECTS

Lead Mentor: Dr. Mehdi Mirakhorli

Archie

Archie aims to build a software architecture recommender system to help developers make better architectural design decisions in any given development context. Archie relies on advanced data mining techniques to learn context dependent analytics from open source projects and use such data to train recommender algorithms.

Desired Skills: Software Architecture, Reverse Engineerings, Recommender Systems; Data Analysis

Deliverables: A novel context-aware architecture recommender system; Prototypes; Datasets of contextual analytics

Effort: 9-10

Cyber-Security

This project focuses on developing catalog of Common Architectural Weakness Enumerations (CAWE) and the necessary algorithms to detect such weaknesses in the source code of a software application. A CAWE describes an architectural flaw in a software system resulting in a security vulnerability.

Desired Skills: Software Architecture, Software Security, Program Analysis

Deliverables: Catalog of common architectural weaknesses; Tools to detect architectural vulnerabilities; Recommendations; Benchmark datasets; Research Demo

Effort: 9-10



Lead Mentor: Dr. Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

CommiClassy

CommiClassy is a classification tool. CommiClassy takes as input a commit message, analyzes its content and classifies it into one of software maintenance various categories (feature update, bug fix, design improvement, etc.) CommiClassy will help the software development team to better estimate their maintenance effort and support the better understanding of developers tasks distribution.

Desired Skills: Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Mobile or Web Development.

Deliverables: Classification Model of commit messages; Model website; Research or Tool Demo paper.

Effort: 8-9

uReview

Mobile developers receieve enormous amounts of review on a daily basis. This tools aims to distinguish the most critical and relevant reviews that they need to act on quickly. uReview is also a classification tool that classifies user reviews into various categories such as, user experience, reporting a bug, showing emotions, rating etc.

Desired Skills: Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Mobile or Web Development.

Deliverables: Classification Model of user reviews; Model website; Research or Tool Demo paper.

Effort: 8-9



Lead Mentor: Dr. Christian Newman

Lang4ref

Implementation of a programming language for automated source code refactoring. This project will involve the design and implementation of a language to help in software development activities. Student will learn about parser generators (ANTLR), language design, XML, intermediate code representations, and refactoring.

Desired Skills: Programming Languages; Natural Language Processing; Refactoring

Deliverables: Programming Language; Scripts; Research Paper

Effort:8-10

Part of Speech Tagger

Implementation of a part of speech tagger for source code identifiers. This project will involve the design and implementation of a part of speech tagger specialized to work more effectively (than traditional taggers) on source code entities such as variable names, function names, comments, and more. Students will learn about markov models, grammatical structure in both programming languages and in natural languages, XML parsing, intermediate representations, and static source code analysis.

Desired Skills: Natural Language Processing; Source Code Analysis;

Deliverables: Part of speech tagger for source code identifiers tool; Source repository and Dataset; Research Paper

Effort: 8-10

This REU Site is sponsored by an award made through the NSF.

This REU Site is sponsored by an award made through the NSF.

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