6/28/2009 11:46:00 PM ITI Staff
Written by ITI Staff
The National Science Foundation has announced a $357,000 award to create a "Research Experiences for Undergraduates" (REU) site in the Information Trust Institute (ITI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Undergraduate students, unlike graduate students, are often confined to classroom work and excluded from hands-on research. The REU program addresses that deficiency by giving undergraduate students the opportunity to participate in actual ongoing research programs in research areas funded by the National Science Foundation. The funding, which supports students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents, allows ITI to host several undergraduate student interns for three summers.
In 2009, the new award is supporting 11 of the 22 students in ITI's annual Undergraduate Summer Internship Program. The REU site award supplies funds for special academic programs to enrich the students' experiences, and partially covers students' travel expenses and summer housing costs.
Participating students in ITI are paired with faculty mentors working on topics of mutual interest. Students contribute to work on real-world research projects and attend weekly technical seminars as well as sessions on ethics and professional standards in engineering research. In addition, students participate in several special events designed to inform them about graduate school and career paths in engineering.
ITI's REU site is co-led by Michael C. Loui, who is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois and a noted authority on computational complexity theory and ethics in engineering, and by Dr. Masooda Bashir, who is ITI's Assistant Director for Social Trust Initiatives.
About the Information Trust Institute (ITI)
The Information Trust Institute is a multidisciplinary cross-campus research unit housed in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is an international leader combining research and education with industrial outreach in trustworthy and secure information systems. ITI brings together over 90 faculty, many senior and graduate student researchers, and industry partners to conduct foundational and applied research to enable the creation of critical applications and cyber infrastructures. In doing so, ITI is creating computer systems, software, and networks that society can depend on to be trustworthy, that is, secure, dependable (reliable and available), correct, safe, private, and survivable. Instead of concentrating on narrow and focused technical solutions, ITI aims to create a new paradigm for designing trustworthy systems from the ground up and validating systems that are intended to be trustworthy. www.iti.illinois.edu
Contact: Jenny Applequist, Information Trust Institute, 217/244-8920, applequi AT iti.uiuc.edu.
Released June 19, 2009
A printable PDF version of this press release is available online.