Stories of our Undergraduates' Successes in Research Labs
Prescience Lab (Dinda)
The Interactive Audio Lab (Pardo)
ArticuLab (Cassell)
Computational Electrodynamics Laboratory (Taflove)


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Undergrad Research Opportunities
For info on REU supplement funding to support undergraduate researchers in your lab, contact Andrea Zakrzewski, Research Administrator, Tel: 7-4068

Prescience Lab
Director: Peter Dinda

2007-2008
Matthew Wojcik and Peter Kamm participated in the V3VEE Project (v3vee.org), funded by the National Science Foundation. Matthew and Peter developed a device driver for an Ethernet network card that will be integrated into the research operating system the project is building.

Timothy Zwiebel participated in the ABSYNTH Project, funded by the National Science Foundation. Tim designed and implemented a Scheme interpreter for use in tightly resource-constrained sensor network nodes. He is participating in ongoing research in the project on the implications of interpreted languages on sensor network hardware and operating systems support, and power management.

2006-2007
Benjamin Prosnitz developed a virtual machine inspection system, building on the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine. His techniques allow a virtual machine monitor to detect semantically rich information about the guest operating system running in a virtual machine, despite the virtual machine being a black box. The resulting paper was published as an EECS technical report.

Sam Rossoff participated in the Empathic Systems Project (empathicsystems.org), and helped to explore the prospects of speculative remote display systems, systems where the computer display is sped up by predicting user and remote system activity. He is a co-author on a paper published at the highly competitive Usenix Annual Technical Conference in 2008, and a co-inventor on the patent application for the speculative remote display invention.

2005-2006
Blair Heuer explored better user interfaces for viewing and using web browsing histories. Part of the project involved an extension for the Firefox web browser that presented a graphical history view. The project also explored integrating history across many users to predict the most likely next page the current user would visit.

Jay Bruins and David Huber worked on a peer-to-peer popularity-based keyword search system based on distributed hash tables. The concept, "distributed popularity indices" was presented as a poster at SIGCOMM, a premier networking conference.

2004-2005
Rachel Gold and Brian Cornell, funded through the National Science Foundation, explored the use of genetic art (evolutionary art) animated by computer network traffic, for network intrusion detection. They developed a highly reliable system, based on parallel execution in a GPU, that was available for use at the entrance of Tech for several months. (ga-ids.cs.northwestern.edu)

2003-2004
Brian Cornell designed, implemented, evaluated, and released Wayback, a versioning file system for Linux. Wayback allows the user to "time travel" the file system back to any point in the past. He is the lead author on the Wayback paper, which was published at the Usenix Annual Technical Conference in 2004. The paper won the award for the best paper of the Freenix track of the conference.

Alex Shoykhet designed and implemented the first generation web interface for the Virtuoso system (virtuoso.cs.northwestern.edu) as his senior honors thesis. The honors thesis was published as a EECS technical report.

The Interactive Audio Lab
Director: Bryan Pardo

2007-2008
Brendan Fox (graduated 2007) did a research project which resulted in an accepted conference paper at the ICME conference in Beijing, China in 2007. He was subsequently employed by Sure.

Michael Skalak (graduated 2008) did a research project which resulted in an accepted paper at the ISMIR conference in Philadelphia, PA in 2008. He is now a graduate student in Computer Science at the University of Virginia.

ArticuLab
Director: Justine Cassell

2007-2008
Julia Merryman completed an honors thesis in the ArticuLab, working on the Virtual Peers as an Intervention for Autism project, and funded by the Cure Autism Now Foundation. Julia was co-author on two papers on this work - one for the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR), and one for Interaction Design for Children. Julia is now an engineer at Intel.

Cathy Breen began her time in the ArticuLab by doing an independent study with Professor Cassell. She was subsequently hired as research assistant, and worked for us for an additional year, before leaving to join the highly-ranked University of Minnesota Masters program in Speech Pathology.

2006-2007
Nate Cantelmo designed and implemented the first iteration of the ECAT (Embodied Conversational Agent Toolkit) system. Nate was a co-author on a paper on this work that was accepted to Intelligent Virtual Agents. Nate was subsequently hired by Yahoo, in their Berkeley-based research lab.

Alberto Gonzalez developed an improved GUI for our Virtual Peers project. After a year in the ArticuLab as undergraduate research assistant, Berto graduated and was hired as full-time systems engineer lead for the NSF-funded Virtual Peers project, where he is currently gaining work experience while making graduate school plans.

2005-2006
Meg Cramer participated in the Junior Summit project in the ArticuLab, analyzing data about children's interactions online. Meg was first author on a paper about that work that won a best paper award at the International Conference on Communities and Technologies. Subsequently Meg co-authored a book chapter with Professor Cassell about girls online. Meg is now working at Intel, in the Peoples and Practices division.

Computational Electrodynamics Laboratory
Director: Allen Taflove

Susan Hagness' undergraduate research on finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) computational electrodynamics modeling of linear and nonlinear interactions of light with micro- and nanostructures led directly to her subsequent hiring by the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Currently, Susan is a tenured full professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jamesina Simpson's undergraduate research on FDTD computational electrodynamics modeling of global extremely low-frequency propagation of electromagnetic waves about the Earth, and on novel ultrahigh-speed wireless digital interconnects, led directly to her subsequent hiring by the University of New Mexico-Albuquerque as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering. Currently, Jamesina is in her second year at the University of New Mexico-Albuquerque as an assistant professor.

To have your undergraduate research success stories added to this list, please email webmaster@eecs ...