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Welcome to the Online Interdisciplinary Big Data Analytics in Science and Engineering REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) Site program at UMBC. This Big Data REU program is funded by the NSF since 2021 to conduct undergraduate research training on how to utilize modern data science and high-performance computing (HPC) techniques to process and analyze big data in many science and engineering disciplines such as Atmospheric Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Medicine.

This REU Site program is conducted purely online to allow students to conduct research without traveling and to experience the increasingly common work environment of multi-disciplinary teams from around the world using state-of-the-art online collaboration tools. Each participant is a member of an interdisciplinary team of undergraduates, supported by a dedicated graduate assistant and faculty mentor, working on a problem posted by a collaborator typically from outside our institution. In this way, you experience the energy and power of multi-disciplinary collaboration in research to overcome the challenges in cutting-edge research.

In recent years, astronomical growth of available datasets in many science and engineering disciplines often requires big data analytics techniques to efficiently and effectively process the large datasets and gain knowledge from them. The program will help students identify frontier research challenges when facing big data in science and engineering, and guide students to conduct research to tackle the research challenges using advanced cyberinfrastructure software technologies (big data, distributed machine/deep learning, HPC, etc.) and hardware resources (including big data cluster, CPU cluster and GPU cluster). The program will provide development of the national workforce in areas of critical need on “Data + Computing + X”.

Each participant who successfully finishes the program and completes all requirements will receive $5,600 stipend and optional support to travel to a conference to present the research.

The training will leverage experiences from previous related efforts: 1) High-Performance Computing (HPC) REU Site at UMBC from 2010 to 2017, 2) Online training on big data + HPC + atmospheric sciences at UMBC from 2018 to 2020, and 3) the previous funding period of this REU Site.

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Acknowledgement

The program is funded by the grant REU Site: Online Interdisciplinary Big Data Analytics in Science and Engineering (grant no. OAC-2050943 and OAC-2348755) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).