Hello,
I am a PhD student in the UW CSE department. My Advisor Aram Harrow and I are interested in hiring an undergraduate for the Summer to work on a full-time undergraduate research (REU) on searching for hard instances of isomorphism problems. We have funding available for the whole Summer and publication opportunities should be possible if the project is successful.
In isomorphism problems, we are concerned with determining whether two combinatorial or algebraic structures are essentially the same. Such problems have proved resistant to the development of efficient algorithms despite evidence that they are not NP-hard such as a lack of hard instances.
In this project, we plan to search for hard instances of the group isomorphism problem by exhaustively checking all groups up to a certain order. The project will therefore involve programming and also some group theory. Depending on how the code performs on a single core, it may be necessary to parallelize the code or port it to run on a cluster. The results should be publishable if the project is successful. Additional technical details are available here: http://www.cs.washington.edu/
Please contact us at aram@cs.washington.edu or djr@cs.washington.edu for more information or if you are interested in working with us this Summer.
Thanks,
David Rosenbaum