REU Site: Research in Consumer Networking Technologies

This funding renews a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site at the University of Missouri – Columbia. Undergraduate students will investigate a variety of interesting and challenging problems that involve consumer networking applications and services that are of significance to the economy and quality of life in areas such as social computing, health care, and public safety. The

students will participate in the faculty mentors’ on-going funded research, investigate technically challenging issues and develop viable solutions and insights. They will participate in professional development activities to prepare them for future graduate studies and a broad range of emerging computing careers. The site will focus on recruiting students from non-PhD granting institutions with

particular emphasis on institutions in and around the state of Missouri. The intellectual merit of the project rests with the leadership, an experienced research group with excellent expertise and experience in the research area. The research will focus on broad topics such as: software-defined networking/virtualization, visual cloud computing, immersive learning with virtual

reality, mobile sensing and environment recognition, securing networked consumer applications, and application-aware network performance optimization. The research activities will lead to a better understanding of the multitude of efficiency, performance, reliability, scalability, and security issues and

tradeoffs in consumer networking technologies and related applications. Advanced networking environments and software developed in the previous REU site programs as well as novel testbeds such as the Missouri University Science DMZ (demilitarized zone) environment, NSF-supported CloudLab/FABRIC and Mizzou CAVE, smart device equipment, and sensor-based monitoring will be

leveraged by the participating students in hands-on experiments within their research projects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.