2009 ITI Undergrad Research Program Underway

Twenty-one undergraduate students from around the world were selected to receive 2009 summer internships from the Information Trust Institute (ITI) at the University of Illinois, and the program is now underway.  This year marks the third offering of the annual undergraduate research program, which has attracted dramatically increasing interest with each year of the program. This year's interns were selected from 351 applicants; the program received 94 applications in 2008 and 40 in 2007, its inaugural year. 

The winning students are participating in 8- to 10-week research projects at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, supervised by ITI researchers in a number of information trust research areas. The awards, which are supported by state and federal funds, include intern stipends and, in some cases, an allocation for travel expenses. This year, faculty mentors participating in the program are from the Illinois departments of Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and Mechanical Science & Engineering, as well as the Information Trust Institute and the Coordinated Science Laboratory.

In addition to working individually with faculty on real-world research projects, interns will attend weekly seminars at which professors present talks on research work ongoing at Illinois and weekly talks on ethics and professionalism in engineering careers. The summer program, which is led by ITI’s Assistant Director for Social Trust Initiatives, Dr. Masooda Bashir, will culminate in a poster session at which all of the interns will present the results of their work.

Below is a list of the successful CS faculty and students participating.

• Bobak Hadidi of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will workwith Prof. Darko Marinov on topics in software testing, software reliability, and software engineering.
• CS student Charlie Meyer,  and Mihai-Adrian Tarce and Cosmin-Aurel M. Radoi of the "Politehnica" University of Timisoara will work with Prof. Ralph Johnson to develop automated refactoring tools that enable programmers to refactor sequential code into parallel codethat uses parallel libraries, such that the refactored code is thread-safe and scalable.
• CS student Pichayoot Ouppaphan will work with Prof. Manoj Prabhakaran on theoretical cryptography and provable security, including secure multiparty computation, encryption schemes, signature schemes, security definitions, and secure composition of protocols.
• Winston Wan of Carnegie Mellon University will work with Prof. Roy Campbell on topics related to operating systems, distributed systems, mapping/reduction, location awareness, and mobiles.

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.  For more information about ITI, visit www.iti.illinois.edu.

Writer: Jenny Applequist, Information Trust Institute, 217/244-8920, applequi [at] iti [dot] illinois [dot] edu.