REU Site: Gluing Computer Science and Convex Geometry: Research Experiences for Undergraduates from Community Colleges

This REU Site aims at providing undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) students with a unique combination of research and hands-on laboratory and deployment experiences in the area of wireless sensor networks at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. Specifically, this new Site focuses on strengthening the synergy between computer science and convex geometry through a truly multidisciplinary environment.

This REU Site includes a set of well-defined and challenging research projects, which are tight to a wide variety of real-world applications, with an emphasis on the problems of connected k-coverage, data collection, and geographic forwarding in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional wireless sensor networks. The major goal of this REU Site is to help the recruited undergraduate students get exposure to several valuable research tools and experiences in the above-mentioned research areas so as to become science and engineering statespersons for their generation.

This new REU Site will help recruit undergraduate students from various U.S. institutions having limited research opportunities with a more focus on underrepresented ones, including Black, Hispanic, female, disable, low-income, and first-generation students, who traditionally have been underrepresented in science and engineering. These are talented undergraduate students who are interested in research as well as hands-on laboratory and deployment experiences in the areas of computer science, convex geometry, and wireless sensor networks for this REU Site.

This summer research experience for these students early in their academic career will certainly benefit them significantly. Indeed, research for undergraduates can be viewed as a high-impact educational practice that is capable of producing positive outcomes for these students, such as student independence and self-confidence, career interest reinforcement, integration into their selected field; conducting experiments; analyzing data; communicating results; and working with others as a team.

In addition, this type of research experience provides interactions between faculty and students, which in turn facilitate personal connections between them; improves student retention and learning experience; and enhances the quality of the undergraduate curriculum. The findings of this REU Site can be disseminated using local, national, and international conferences, and also published in highly reputed journals.

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.