The Computer Science Department's research efforts cover a broad spectrum of areas. Much of our research is cross-disciplinary, and many faculty members are engaged in this effort.

Applicants will be able to select three projects as their top preferences on the application form. Efforts will be made to match students with their preferred topics as closely as possible.

Title:	Compiler-Driven I/O Management
Description:	Comanche is a software system whose goal it is to reduce the amount of implicit I/O of a given program. This project centers around reengineering Comanche to make it more user-friendly and useful for scientific computing.
Specific Requirements:	N/A
Faculty Sponsor:	Ernst L. Leiss
Web Link:	http://www.cbl.uh.edu/~reu/2006/EL1.html
Topic ID:	EL1

Title:	Computational Biomedicine: Cardiovascular Informatics
Description:	Every year 1.2 million Americans suffer a heart attack; in 2001, over half a million of these attacks were fatal. Developing the technologies necessary for successful screening of individuals at risk for heart disease is becoming progressively more critical as the number of fatal attacks increases. Toward this end, our group, in collaboration with cardiologists worldwide, is developing advanced computational tools for the analysis of medical data from Computer Tomography and Intravascular Ultrasound. The student will interact with an expert group of collaborators, researchers, and other students in the fields of cardiology and computer vision-all while gaining invaluable experience in academic research, software development, data analysis toolboxes, and visualization.
Specific Requirements:	We are looking for a driven, dynamic and highly creative individual with unique approaches to problem solving. Excellence in object-oriented programming is a must, and knowledge of medical image analysis and statistics is desirable.
Faculty Sponsor:	Ioannis A. Kakadiaris
Web Link:	http://www.cbl.uh.edu/~ioannisk/
Topic ID:	IK2

Title:	Data Mining and Information Extraction
Description:	We are looking for enthusiastic, passionate and bright students for all our projects. This project will investigate how to mine and analyze information from medical documents (research papers, drug studies, etc.) and financial documents (SEC filings). Student will learn text mining, information extraction techniques and meta-analysis.
Specific Requirements:	None - interest in statistics is desirable
Faculty Sponsor:	Rakesh Verma
Web Link:	http://www.cs.uh.edu/~rmverma
Topic ID:	RV1

Title:	Game-Game Revolution
Description:	The student will be developing a computer game for cell-phones that promotes physical activity. This game will be played either by a single player or by multiple players in a buddy-list system. The game will feed itself from tiny accelerometer sensors that will communicate with the cell-phone through bluetooth connections. These accelerometers will measure physical activity, as they will be attached as artifacts (e.g., belt clips) to the bodies of the players. The student will interact with other members of the Computational Physiology Lab (CPL) who are already working on this project and have developed prototype sensors and various game versions.
Specific Requirements:	Knowledge of Visual C++ and basic math (calculus and linear algebra).
Faculty Sponsor:	Ioannis Pavlidis
Web Link:	http://www.cpl.uh.edu/html http://www.cpl.uh.edu/html/modules.php?name=zlTeam&func=detail&tid=11
Topic ID:	IP1

Title:	Information Retrieval, Search Engines
Description:	We are looking for enthusiastic, passionate and bright students for all our projects. This project will investigate meta-search engines and ranking. One specific issue will be how to combine different rankings of the same information nuggets. Student will learn information retrieval techniques including ranking, search engines and meta-search engines.
Specific Requirements:	None - interest in statistics is desirable
Faculty Sponsor:	Rakesh Verma
Web Link:	http://www.cs.uh.edu/~rmverma
Topic ID:	RV2

Title:	Information Security
Description:	Information sometimes leaks out in unintentional ways (through side channels). In this project we are interested in investigating some of these leaks and try to quantify them. This project investigates leaking information through program execution time.
Specific Requirements:	Data Structures and Algorithms, some knowledge of PC and Unix architecture will be a plus.
Faculty Sponsor:	Stephen Huang
Web Link:	http://www2.cs.uh.edu/shuang/IDRG/index.html http://www.cs.uh.edu/shuang/
Topic ID:	SH1

Title:	Intrusion Detection
	Intrusion detection is the process of identifying and responding to malicious activity targeted at computing and networking resources. Many techniques can be applied to identify or trace the intruders including: algorithmic, statistical, AI, and data mining. This project involves the study of network packets to determine of two connection belongs to the same chain.
Specific Requirements:	Data Structures and Algorithms, some knowledge of network, OS, and AI/data mining techniques will be a plus.
Faculty Sponsor:	Stephen Huang
Web Link:	http://www2.cs.uh.edu/shuang/IDRG/index.html http://www.cs.uh.edu/shuang/
Topic ID:	SH2

Title:	Lie Detection
Description:	The student will work as part of a large team consisting of Ph.D. students and research engineers in the Computational Physiology Lab (CPL) as well as psychologists from SUNY Buffalo. He/she will be analyzing physiological data from behavioral experiments related to lie detection. This is part of a long term collaborative research project between CPL and the Psychology Lab at SUNY Buffalo. The student will be using imaging, mathematical and statistical modeling, and software engineering as tools in his/her data analysis effort. This is not only an intriguing scientific project but also a unique opportunity for the undergraduate student to gain experience of modern multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional team research.
Specific Requirements:	Knowledge of Visual C++ and basic math (calculus and linear algebra).
Faculty Sponsor:	Ioannis Pavlidis
Web Link:	http://www.cpl.uh.edu/html/ http://www.cpl.uh.edu/html/modules.php?name=zlTeam&func=detail&tid=11
Topic ID:	IP2

Title:	Parallel I/O, Information retrieval
Description:	We are looking for enthusiastic, passionate and bright students for all our projects. This project involves the implementation and performance evaluation of a new paradigm for distributing keyword-indexed information across an array of disks to balance the load and maximize the parallelism. Design of new methods, inspired by this paradigm, for other kinds of data including temporal and/or spatial data will also be investigated. Student will learn parallel I/O techniques, basics of information retrieval, disk modeling and performance evaluation.
Specific Requirements:	Programming experience in C.
Faculty Sponsor:	Rakesh Verma
Web Link:	http://www.cs.uh.edu/~rmverma
Topic ID:	RV3

Title:	Radio Controlled Cognitive Vehicle
Description:	This project investigates the integration of sensing, communication and control in a tightly coupled environment. Wireless communication will be used in both communication real time control data from the command center as well as collecting position and sensing information from the vehicle for navigation purpose. We are looking for a driven, dynamic and highly creative individual with unique approaches to problem solving.
Specific Requirements:	Excellence in C/C++, Java programming is a must, past experience in GUI development, and knowledge of computer networks and embedded systems is desirable.
Faculty Sponsor:	Rong Zheng
Web Link:	http://www.cs.uh.edu/~rzheng/
Topic ID:	RZ1

Title:	Watermarks
Description:	Two related projects center around these issues of watermarks: (1) MPEG-Based Watermark Implementation, and (2) Implementing Time-Variant Watermarks.
Specific Requirements:	N/A
Faculty Sponsor:	Ernst L. Leiss
Web Link:	http://www.cbl.uh.edu/~reu/2006/EL2.html
Topic ID:	EL2