Hello!
I’m looking for a motivated student (or two) who is interested in
working on programming language VM 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 currently
have a base of well over one thousand computers and expect the number
of computers using this environment to more than double in the next six
months. 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):
Advanced networking support — Better support for clients behind
Network Address Translators (NAT), IPv6 support, and improved DHCP
support.
Enhancements for mobile devices — Increased portability to mobile
devices, and location services for mobile devices.
Website development especially involving web mashups, XMLRPC,
and web design.
Educational support — Creating example course materials, improving the
user interface of tools, and answering student questions.
Tor project support — TCP over UDP and donation as a hidden service.
Quality assurance — Reading administrator logs on remote systems,
release testing, and automatic control of test farms.
Improved library support — Implementing / porting libraries to our framework.
Benchmarking — Predicting how long it will take a program to run on a
piece of hardware.
Resource allocation — Providing dynamic assurances about the
resources consumed on a specific piece of hardware.
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 — Almost all 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 three who won awards and/or fellowships for research. All
of the undergraduates that I have worked with for more than one year
were hired by their first choice in industry. Our lab currently is
working with more than 10 talented undergraduates, including two who
are working towards an honor’s thesis.
We’re most interested in applicants who have a CS GPA >= 3.5 and
either have taken 3 CS courses or have prior work experience.
Applicants also should have at least 1 year until graduation.
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
