REU Site in Software Engineering (REUSE) at Carnegie Mellon University

Software engineering (SE) is a rich field focused on improving the effectiveness of software development through a variety of tools and techniques. Research in software engineering brings core aspects of computer science, such as programming languages and artificial intelligence, to bear on software concerns such as privacy, security, scalability, and adaptability. This project supports an ongoing Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Carnegie Mellon University that provides students with training in interdisciplinary software engineering research, including understanding the research literature, formulating and refining research questions, developing novel solutions to software engineering problems, and applying scientific evaluation methods. The project will support the training of 30 undergraduate students over 3 years with research experiences in interdisciplinary software engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. These students will be recruited primarily from institutions where students have limited research opportunities, with a special emphasis on providing opportunities to first- and second-year students. Participants will perform research with faculty mentors, participate in community activities, and communicate their work both through traditional publication channels and student research competitions and via department-wide presentations at the end of the summer. A primary goal for the program is to improve the pipeline from college to graduate school and from graduate school into faculty positions; simultaneously, the site actively trains graduate students to act as effective mentors of research assistants, a critical skill for future faculty members. The project will build on the experience of many of the faculty mentors who have worked with undergraduate students in their individual research. While built on computer science fundamentals, software engineering is simultaneously an engineering discipline. That is, both the practice of SE and SE research problems revolve around technical solutions that successfully resolve conflicting constraints. As such, trade-offs between costs and benefits are an integral part of evaluating the effectiveness of methods and tools. This REU site takes this further by tackling research problems that are at the intersection of software engineering and another field, including privacy, security, mobility, and human psychology and other sciences. A subset of these problems includes machine learning in production; automatically debugging robotic systems; formal verification of high-level multiparty cryptographic protocols; and sustainable open-source communities. 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.