REU 2025

Program Overview:

The 2025 REU program is funded by the NSF and designed to bring together undergraduate students from different universities to work together on research projects. At the end of the ten week program, each project group prepares a poster, a research paper, and a final presentation.

Program duration: 5/19/2025 (Monday) - 7/25/2025 (Friday)

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Faculty mentors:

Dr. Prasad Calyam is a Curators' Distinguished Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. He also serves as the Director of MU’s Cyber Education, Research and Infrastructure Center. He is an expert in computer networking, multimedia applications, and network measurement. He has been the primary mentor of over 65 M.S./Ph.D. graduate students (including 20 Female, 3 Hispanic, and 2 African American), over 68 undergraduate students (52 supported by NSF REU program; 11 Female, 2 Hispanic and 8 African American), and 6 Postdocs. Student co-authors have heavily contributed to his over 195 peer-reviewed publications in reputed conferences and journals. He currently advises 7 Ph.D. (2 Female, 1 African American, 2 Hispanic), 6 M.S. (including 1 Female), and 4 undergraduate students. His research sponsors include: NSF, NSA, DOS, ARL, DOE, VMware, Cisco, Dell, Verizon, IBM, Huawei, Internet2, and others.

Dr. Yi Shang is a Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. He has extensive research experience on wireless sensor networks, mobile computing, and artificial intelligence, and has published over 200 journal and conference papers and received 6 patents. He has graduated 14 Ph.D. students, over 70 M.S. students, and supervised over 60 undergraduate researchers. He is currently supervising 10 Ph.D., 5 M.S., and 1 undergraduate students. His research has been supported by NSF, NIH, US Army, DARPA, Microsoft Research, Raytheon and Missouri Dept. of Conservation. He co-founded TigerAware LLC., and helped coordinate previous REU programs and a faculty mentor and Program Director.

Dr. Kannappan Palaniappan is a Curators' Distinguished Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. He is the Director of Computational Imaging & VisAnalysis (CIVA), with projects funded by NSF, Army Research Lab, Air Force Research Laboratory, NASA, and NIH. He served as a National Academies Jefferson Science Fellow and received the NASA Public Service Medal. His research covers computer vision, high performance computing, data science and biomedical image analysis. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed publications, and mentored over 15 Posdocs, 12 Ph.D. students, 27 M.S. students, and over 30 undergraduate students. He is currently supervising 9 Ph.D. students, 2 M.S. students, 1 undergraduate student, and 2 Research Scientists, who are available to help the students in REU projects.

Dr. Ekincan Ufuktepe is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. He has previously worked at SAP Labs France as a researcher in the Security and Trust department, where he worked on preventing and mitigating input validation vulnerabilities on the SAP HANA cloud. His current research interests involve software engineering, software testing, software security, program analysis, and search-based software engineering (SBSE). He has mentored several graduate and REU students in research projects. He has been awarded multiple times with Outstanding Professor in EECS by the student board, Jr. Faculty Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring by the EECS department, and Ann K. Covington Award for student mentorship.

Evaluator, Dr. Se Woong Lee is an Associate Professor in the Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (ELPA) Department at University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Lee earned his Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and joined ELPA in 2016. In broad strokes, his research focuses on developing innovative ways to measure, evaluate, and improve educational policy in ways that meaningfully impact or address issues challenging educators today. His research primarily focuses on analyzing important aspects of education policy, particularly on educator labor market, educator effectiveness, and educator quality. His work on examining cumulative effect of teacher quality on students’ educational success was recognized by the American Educational Research Association with a highly competitive AERA Dissertation Grant, and received Outstanding Dissertation Award from University of Wisconsin-Madison in Education Policy area.

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Graduate Student Coordinator:

Vani Seth Vani is currently pursuing her MS degree in Computer Science from the University of Missouri-Columbia in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her current research interests include Large Language Model (LLM) architecture, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and Cybersecurity.
Email: vs4ky@mail.missouri.edu
Phone: +1 (573) 968-9444

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Work schedule

1. 8 hours, 9am-12pm and 1-6pm in the office or in a lab.
2. You are required to sign up a time sheet posted at the office every day.
3. Use the Microsoft Teams channel to interact virtually with the REU Site group.

Weekly program meeting: Tuesday, 10-12pm or 2-4pm, in 222 Naka Hall (unless announced differently). All mentors are welcome to attend.

Weekly research journal of each team due: 5pm every Friday - report daily research activities.

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Schedule

NOTE: We encourage students to consider submitting their final project reports as papers (full papers, or short papers) to venues such as: the annual National Workshops for REU Research in Networking and Systems (REUNS), IEEE CCNC, IEEE ICNC, IEEE NCA and others with July/August 2025 deadlines.

Computer networks basics

• Watch Computer Networks Lectures

Research advice

• Watch Advice to young scientists
• Why and How to do research
• How OKRs work in Google
• How to read a research paper
• How to write a research paper
• How to present a scientific talk
• How to build a research system
• Why to write the paper first
• How to give a talk

Software-Defined Networking related materials

• Watch Software Defined Networking
• Open Networking Foundation https://www.opennetworking.org
• Leveraging OpenFlow for Resource Placement of Virtual Desktop Cloud Applications
• VDC-Analyst: Design and Verification of Virtual Desktop Cloud Resource Allocations
• Orchestrating Science DMZs for Big Data Acceleration: Challenges and Approaches
• Dolus: Cyber Defense using Pretense against DDoS Attacks in Cloud Platforms*

Computer Science Ethics

• Code of Ethics, ACM
• Computer and Information Ethics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

IRB training (http://research.missouri.edu/irb/CITI_Instructions) to receive IRB certification

• Responsible Conduct of Research courses
• Human Subject Research courses

LaTeX resources

• Use IEEE publication LaTeX or Overleaf to typeset your report.
• MikTex as the LaTeX compiler, http://miktex.org/
• Texmaker as the Editor Environment, http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/
• Tutorial: https://www.latex-tutorial.com/tutorials

Prior REU project examples as best practices to follow:

• Weekly/daily research journals
• OKR and literature Survey Talks
• Midterm Presentations
• Final Presentations
• Research Forum Posters
• Conference Publications

  Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (Award CNS-2243619)

        Hosted by the University of Missouri