If you are a student looking for an interesting Master's thesis or an undergraduate looking to do some research, you have come to the right place!
Below I list some projects that I am interested in getting done. I don't have time to do all of them myself, so I am looking for student volunteers. These project will give hands-on experience with the latest technologies, they will look great on your resume, and they will fulfill some of your requirements for graduation.
As long as a project is listed here it means that it is still up for grabs. If you are interested simply send me an email so we can set up an appointment to talk about it.
Finally, these are not research assistant positions. I do not have any money left over to pay for another research assistant. When I do, I will post the job wanted ad in my homepage.
To learn more about my lab visit the multiagent dynamics laboratory or vistit my blog.
I have an NSF project called Negotiation Networks in which we study how agents in complex exchange networks might be made to behave so as to achive some desired global outcome. The project involves the builind and analysis of models of exchange networks using NetLogo. If you are interested in emergenet behaviors and agent-based simulations then you will enjoy this research area.
The web science initiative aims to study the web in the same way an entomologist studies ants: look carefully at what is happening in the colony and come up with theories that predict and explain the observed behavior. This project requires programming abilities for gathering the needed data and then scientific abilities for analyzing and building suitable models. I am especially interested in mining social networks and blog linkage data to understand how links are created and how ideas spread.
I am interested in finding someone who wants to become an expert in MapReduce along with its open-source implementation known as Hadoop. These are the tools that Google, Yahoo, and many others use to perform humongous calculations on gazillions of computers, such as calculating the PageRank of all pages on a PetaByte subset of the web using 100,000 PCs.
My plan is to teach Hadoop as part of a new class called CSCE 242: Client-Server Computing (really should be called "web applications" but they would not let me use that name) which will be taught for the first time in Spring 2009. To get ready for that I will need someone interested in setting up Hadoop in the lab machines and using it on some bioinformatics data problems that I've lined up.
You can read my negotiation networks leaflet to get a better idea of what we are doing.