REU / Undergraduate Research Projects
One of the exciting aspects of university research is the ability to involve undergraduates in cutting edge research. Through both university credit and paid summer research opportunities afforded by the National Science Foundation, our group has been fortunate to involve many undergraduate researchers. The table below lists various undergraduate research projects directed by Dr. Striegel and a description/link (if available) of the project as noted by the undergraduate student.
Want to get involved? Take a look at our
open positions page or contact
Dr. Striegel. There are no restrictions with regards to your year in school (freshman are welcome to apply), only that you are currently a domestic undergraduate student.
| Semester |
Student |
Project |
Project Overview |
| Summer 08 |
Joe Hof |
Accelerated Media Streaming for Home Networks |
When pictures are uploaded from a camera, every photo must be individually uploaded, no matter how similar two pictures might be. If an efficient solution can be discovered for this problem, it can then be scaled up to address the overlying greater problems like bandwidth consumption on the internet. In lieu of this, my main task has been to compare two pictures, analyze the amount of redundancy, and, if viable, create the second picture by just changing only a fraction of the pixels from the first picture. |
| Summer 08 |
Jordan Brindza, Jessica Szweda |
Wiimote Interactions for Freshman Engineering Education |
The focus of this project was to develop hands-on laboratory modules and demonstrations involving the Nintendo Wiimote to augment the programming module for the freshmen Introduction to Engineering course. By creating a robust set of MATLAB functions we hope to make the Wiimote accessible to students of all programming levels. |
| Fall 07 |
Joe Hof |
YouTube Repository Analysis |
Prior to Fall Break, I have completed a Perl script which parses through .txt files containg YouTube? video codes and downloads each video named in file (if we do not already have it downloaded). Over break I will run this script over a large number of files in order to extract as many videos as possible to do statistical analysis on. |
| Fall 07 |
Matt Hudson |
802.1X Proxy Assessment |
Included in the final report that is now posted is a basic overview of 802.1x and the RADIUS authentication set-up that I used. This includes not only the physical network set-up, but also the modifications that needed to be made to certain radiusdb files in order for the system to work correctly. Once that was up and running, I was finally able to watch packets flowing across the wire and actually dissect the RADIUS packets themselves. Included are the breakdowns of RADIUS access-request and access-accept packets. Code to recognize RADIUS packets coming through the pass-through system was written. It looks at the source and destination port of the packet and see if it is going to or coming from 1812 (the default RADIUS port). |
| Fall 07 |
Ben Roesch |
Windows Lockdown Agent |
At this point, the Lockdown Agent currently runs as a service in the Windows environment. It starts any time the machine is booted. It is able to pull a status file from a webserver using wget and (occaisionally) seems able to pull the status signal from the file. If the status indicates that it should run, then it invokes the netstat command through the Windows command line and saves the netstat information to a file. |
| Summer 07 |
Greg Allan |
Graph Visualization for GEMS and LockDown |
With the torrent of data that the lab produces from transparent bandwidth conservation, GEMS, and LockDown, the ability to visualize the data is critical to our results. The project adapted SoNIA together with Java-based controls to help visualize the data produced by our systems for both directing research and system management. |
| Summer 07 |
Nathan Kohlmeier |
GPU Acceleration for Bandwidth Conservation |
This summer, I worked on trying to identify patterns in network traffic by Rabin fingerprinting. For this, I used one of the new NVidia G80 cards (8800 GTS) to do lookups on the data. The intent was to increase performance of the lookups over a normal CPU setup. |
| Summer 07 |
Kyle O'Brien |
USB Flash Power Properties |
As an REU this summer I set out to see if using usb flash memory devices is energy efficient. The majority of my research was conducted on Crossbow Stargates which had a usb 1.1 port. Power consumption was higher than initially anticipated, but compared to other means of reading/writing data, such as transferring data with bluetooth, it is the best. The application and overall purpose of my research was to eventually help Dr. Striegel and others in the future to design a caching algorithm for battery operated embedded systems with a usb port. |
| Spring 07 |
Michael Moriarity |
Inferring Popularity on YouTube |
The research question posed was whether or not there is something in common with the different videos posted on these websites, and if so, how can the video data be cached so as to free up bandwidth usage. Social bookmarking websites such as Digg and Slashdot often link to a YouTube video, and if the video is posted on a website which has a certain bandwidth limit, then a video making the front page of Digg or Slashdot is certain to use up all of a site's bandwidth, forcing the smaller website to shut down. Dr. Striegel's research aims to find a way to prevent such events from happening using packet-caching and other similar techniques. |
| Spring 07 |
Joe Hof |
Inferring Popularity on YouTube |
(see above) |
| Spring 07 |
Patricia Strei |
Web Interface for RIPPS |
|
| Spring 07 |
Patrick McGowan |
Inter-Stream Redundancy Analysis |
As part of my research with Dr. Striegel, I am examining similarities in video files from places like YouTube? and Google Video. The ultimate goal is to determine if there are any similarities between two different videos that would allow for a more efficient way of delivering the video across the internet. So far, I am using two different tests on the different video files. First, I am computing a Hamming Distance across different 32 bit segments of the two files. Using data collected by computing a sliding (i.e. measure the Hamming Distance of a 32 bit, or 4 byte segment, and then slide down one byte) Hamming distance on the two video files, I hope to find some similarity between the two video files that may be of some use. Next, I am going to run multiple videos through a set of code that computes Rabin fingerprints. The ultimate goal is to see if there are any portions of the file that exchibit the same Rabin fingerprint. Using this, we would attempt to exploit the similarities between the video files to make transmission less bandwith intensive. |
| Summer 06 |
Andrew Matta |
Improving Cheap Logger |
Copyright © by the contributing authors. All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.