Hello!
I’m looking for a talented student (or two) who is interested in
working on a safe programming environment that will be deployed
on millions of computers ( https://seattle.cs.washington.edu ). This
environment is currently being used in networking and distributed systems
classes at universities around the world (including at UW!). We already
have the world’s largest open testbed. This is an excellent opportunity to
work on a very visible project.
There are a huge number of interesting subprojects that a student
could work on. Here are a few example projects (but we are open to
suggestions):
Google Native Client integration — Some of the Google folks are interested
in integrating Google Native Client with our API. This would allow
x86 binaries
to be executed on our platform and provide Google Native Client with
performance isolation and resource restrictions.
Tor project support — Participation in Seattle as a hidden service to better
anonymize Seattle users.
Building cool apps — We’ve built DHTs, MapReduce, Paxos, and
other interesting applications, but we’re open to more development.
As I mentioned before, these are only a few of the potential
subprojects that we’re interested in students working on. If you
have your own project ideas we’d be keen to hear about them!
The benefits of doing research in our group:
* Work experience for your resume — Applicants with a background
in building real software are highly sought after in industry.
Working on a “production” research project gives you that experience
without needing to commute to work.
* Team environment — A significant amount of the work in our lab is
done in teams of 2-4 undergrads. This helps to provide a supportive working
environment and allows students to accomplish more impressive things
in a shorter period of time.
* Research experience — One goal of the work is to spread
awareness by publishing in top conferences. If you are interested in
graduate school, this will help tremendously.
* Course credit or pay — Students will receive course credit
or pay in most circumstances.
* Letter of recommendation — Letters of recommendation about
research experience (Joe built an application used on millions of
computers) are often more reflective of skills than a letter based on
classroom interaction (Joe got a 3.8 in my class).
An applicant must have:
* Strong programming skills
* Self-motivation
I have had the privilege to work with many talented students,
including five who won awards and/or fellowships for research. Our
lab currently is working with 10 talented undergraduates. Two students
have either completed an honor’s thesis on this project and another
student has their thesis in progress.
We’re most interested in applicants who have prior experience working
either on open source software or have significant industry experience.
Competitive students should have a CS GPA >= 3.5 and
either have taken 3 CS courses or have prior experience.
Applicants also should have at least 1 year until graduation.
Significant experience in Python or C are a plus but not required.
If you are interested in learning more about our project, please send
an email to justinc@cs.washington.edu with the following information
(you need not list more an a few sentences for any item):
* Name
* Previous / Expected Degrees w/ CS and Math GPA
* Scholarships / Awards
* Expected graduation date
* Known programming languages / libraries and level of expertise
* Operating System familiarity (i.e. RedHat Linux administrator for 3
years, Windows user for 10 years)
* Work experience
* Any other skills I should know about
* The coolest project you’ve worked on
* Would you like pay / credit / volunteer?
* Email address you’d like to be contacted at
Thanks,
Justin