CS 490 SPECIAL PROJECTS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE: Research Experience for Undergraduates
Fall 2007, Instructor:
Jeffrey Horn
CS 490, Special Project in Computer Science: Research Experience for
Undergraduates
TIME: Fall 2007 TuTh 4:00-5:40pm
INSTRUCTOR: Jeffrey Horn
PREREQUISITES: CS 201 or permission of instructor
CRN:
DESCRIPTION:
This course introduces students to research in Computer Science by actually
conducting research. Specifically, students will work individually or in teams
to discover new, original, publishable results. Topics will be chosen from the
CS fields of Artificial Life, Genetic Algorithms, Evolutionary Robotics, and
Artificial Evolution in Computer Games, because these are the instructor's areas
of expertise, and because these are exciting new fields whose frontiers can be
reached rapidly by motivated undergraduates.
We will begin by discussing a few of the latest award-winning papers from the
2006-7 conferences, then review our own ongoing projects in the NERL (Northern
Evolutionary Robotics Laboratory), choose our goals, and design code and
experiments aimed at new results. To provide focus, the goal will be a draft
conference, workshop, or journal paper ready for submission to external peer
review. While students will be encouraged to present their results at the
Argonne national Laboratories Undergraduate Symposium, NMU's Celebration of
Student Research and Creative Works, and in the departmental colloquium series,
the main goal will be publication at the international, peer-reviewed research
level. (Recently, a few students in the Department have achieved this goal even
earning external REU funding and travel.)
Students are welcome to form teams (teams work wonderfully for distributing the
workload but require distributing the credit), with members focusing on
different tasks, such as programming, writing, or mathematical analysis,
according to their strengths or interests.
Academic publications and industry white papers are the coin of the realm of
Computer Science, and a research publication as an undergraduate is a rare,
distinguishing item on one's resume, CV, or graduate school application. The
experience could also be career-changing.