Computer Science

Drexel’s Computer Science Department has a long history of involving undergraduates in research, and the research accomplishments of its undergraduates are routinely acknowledged by the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) annual outstanding undergraduate competition. This year three Drexel CS students were recognized: Iris Howley (Finalist), James Thiel (honorable mention), and Marc Winners (honorable mention).

Undergraduate research at Drexel has been nourished through Drexel’s co-op program, where many students choose to do one or more of their co-ops in one of the department’s research labs. A particularly successful arrangement has occurred over the year’s through the ACIN project.

All three of this year’s Drexel awardees have participated in various ACIN project under the supervision of Professors William Regli and Moshe Kam.

1) Iris Howley:

“As a sophomore I began research in applying Semantic Web technologies to unpredictable, poorly connected networks. At the National Institute of Standards and Technology I applied this newly acquired knowledge of ontologies to developing a robot classification system for urban search and rescue. My most recent project took place at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland where instead of creating semantic content, I extracted semantic content in order to automatically discover common patterns in engineering design rationale”.

2) James Thiel

“Under Dr. Regli and Dr. Kam, I took part in several computer networking research projects. I tested the performance of various network security programs and helped create a software framework to consolidate their output, and I later applied the results to a network traffic analysis project. I also wrote an emulator and performed experiments for a quality-of-service project in collaboration with Lockheed Martin. The projects gave me experience in software design, experimentation and analysis, technical writing, and public speaking, and I had the opportunity to attend the Network & Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego”.

3) Marc Winners

“My first research project at Drexel was the Secure Wireless Agent Testbed. SWAT combined a number of different research areas into one network of ad-hoc wireless mobile nodes functioning as a multi-agent system with secure group-based messaging. I was immediately surprised at how much I was learning outside of a classroom. The first few weeks of SWAT was like drinking from the firehose. It was a crash course in wide variety of areas from distributed key agreement (TGDH) to the arcane internals of the Linux kernel. … I am told that a version of the SWAT system has since been deployed in Iraq.”

Past awardees are:

2007: David Turner (honorable mention)

2006: John Novatnack (honorable mention), Evan Sultanik (honorable mention)

2005: Dmitriy Bespalov (finalist), Joseph Kopena (honorable mention)

2004: Cheuk Yiu Ip (honorable mention)

2002: Mitchell Peabody (honorable mention)

2001: Lisa Anthony received the Outstanding Female Undergraduate award