The UW Computer Science & Engineering department/Networks Lab is seeking upper-level undergraduates research RAs to work on projects related to Internet anti-censorship technologies. For one of the projects, we require students with experience in JavaScript development and an interest in contributing to open source software.
Students working in this role would be responsible for maintaining freedom.js, a JavaScript framework that facilitates the development of decentralized browser extensions and web applications. For the other project, we desire students with low-level systems experience in order to develop network probing tools and measurement systems to understand how censorship is performed in various countries. Specific skills or experience desired include:
-Understanding/awareness of topics in networking, encryption, peer-to-peer operations, and related CS areas
-Interest in privacy, open source, and the intersection between technology and social issues
-Comfort with version control (git), software testing (unit/integration/continuous integration), command line/server operations, and other current software engineering practices
-Knowledge of the modern JavaScript ecosystem (node/npm, grunt, karma, jasmine, promises, ECMAScript 6+, etc.) *or*
-Knowledge of low-level C networking and interest in building tools for large-scale data collection and analysis.
The ideal candidate need not have experience with everything above, but will be passionate and able to learn and build things in a self-directed fashion (e.g. read documentation, set up development environments, manage cloud servers, experiment and debug problems up and down the webapp/browser stack, etc.). There will likely be semi-weekly meetings with engineers from Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas) to coordinate work. Credit or pay is possible.
To apply, just email arvind@cs.washington.edu your CV and a UW transcript. Please include a paragraph describing related experience, and if possible links to projects (e.g. on GitHub).