Please review the research opportunities listed below and submit a separate application for each opportunity that may interest you. Students may apply for up to three opportunities. All applications must be submitted via US Mail no later than April 6, 2011.

Please note that students applying for this opportunity must be 16 years of age on or before June 26, 2011 per UCSD volunteer and employee requirements.

San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego June 27- August 12, 2011 (seven weeks). Internship hours will be coordinated with your mentor and can range from 10 to 25 hours per week.

High School Volunteer Summer Research Opportunities

Project Title: Generation of multimedia scientific educational content in PDF documents

Project Overview
The Protein Data Bank (PDB) archive contains information about experimentally-determined structures of proteins, nucleic acids, and complex assemblies, and is a foremost data and information resource for the scientific community. Part of the PDB's remit is to provide K12-appropriate educational materials regarding our data repository and molecular structure determination. To this end, we would like to develop advanced multimedia content covering several important and representative PDB entries. PDF format documents are capable of containing both textual and multimedia content, such as images, movies and interactive 3D objects. In collaboration with the PDB mentor, the student will be involved in selecting representative PDB entries, generating multimedia content using desktop computer software such as Jmol and MeshLab, and then embedding this content into a PDF file. The student will gain experience in advanced PDF file creation using Adobe Acrobat, generating multimedia content using the Jmol application and other open source applications.
Internship Hours Per Week: Flexible up to 25 hours

Project Title: StudentTECH Portal Facilitation and Analysis

Project Overview
The SDSC StudentTECH Program is a new program of workshops, seminars, and outreach events intended to make science and technology fun and easy for students of all ages. To help facilitate and nurture an every-growing community of actively-engaged learners we are creating the StudentTECH Portal. Developed with the Joomla content management system, the StudentTECH portal will serve as a central repository for active learning tools, resources, news, and events. Since, by definition, the REHS Student Intern will be a model of the prototypical portal user, they will serve in a central role providing insights and feedback on all things of current interest to STEM learners. The REHS Student Intern will be introduced to all aspects of the StudentTECH Community Portal, including administration, maintenance, design, development, and upgrading. A survey of student interest in specific areas of science, technology, engineering, and math will be administered with the assistance of the intern to provide additional important feedback for SDSC StudentTECH workshops and seminars. A database of reference material will be assembled with the intern’s assistance as well. The student will also have the opportunity to help with development and evaluation of interactive educational models and simulations.
Internship Hours Per Week: Flexible up to 25 hours

Project Title: Refinement of Data Mining Software and Application to Space Plasmas for Data Analysis and Visualization

Project Overview
The overall summer student research project will include implementation of a novel data mining algorithm within an existing machine learning environment, testing of the tool, and the application of the simple data analysis and visualization techniques to the space plasmas data. The student will gain a valuable research experience in learning about data mining, data preparation, visualization and modeling in the space sciences data, as well as preparation, visualization and modeling of general scientific data. Furthermore, the student will have the ability to gain extensive experience and perfect his/hers JAVA implementation skills ranging from the planning stage to the coding and testing stages. Major activities will include (a) porting of MineTool, a novel data mining method, into weka and (b) implementation and evaluation of use of GPUs in data mining. Some of the subtasks will include adding a filter for variable expansion and a filter for conversion of time series data into static data to the preprocessing tab in weka, as well as implementing the MineTool algorithm in the Classify tab as a data mining method. Furthermore, the activities will include extensive testing of the newly added data mining method.
Internship Hours Per Week: 25 hours

Project Title: iDASH: integrating Data for analysis, Anonymization, and SHaring

Project Overview
The iDASH project will create a national center for biomedical computing that develops new algorithms, open-source tools, and computational infrastructure and services that enable biomedical and behavioral researchers to integrate Data for analysis, Anonymization, and Sharing. A multitude of research questions exist that cannot be addressed adequately by viewing data from a single healthcare institution, and concerns about privacy when sharing data add a significant barrier to research progress. iDASH will address this fundamental challenge by providing a secure, privacy-preserving environment in which researchers can analyze genomic, transcriptomic, and highly annotated phenotypic data. iDASH will focus on privacy protection through anonymization, data simulation, and an informed consent management system. It will concentrate on data analysis through the development of new tools for data annotation and integration across temporal and spatial dimensions and develop algorithms for rare event detection and risk adjustment. This project is a starting point for the development of new tools that will advance three biologically-based projects which span the molecular-individual-population spectrum: (1) molecular phenotyping of Kawasaki Disease, (2) surveillance of anticoagulation agents, and (3) individualized intervention to enhance physical activity. Students will be involved in the design and implementation of a mechanism that allows participating centers to submit data anonymously. Students will help devise a cryptographic protocol where participating centers form a cloud to which queries can be submitted and from where results can be obtained.
Internship Hours Per Week: 20 hours

Project Title: SCAlable National Network for Effectiveness Research (SCANNER)

Project Overview
The SCANNER project will develop a distributed network infrastructure for comparative effectiveness research that provides participating sites the means for flexibility in data sharing. This flexibility will be implemented by allowing codification of data sharing policies, where each institution will specify its own policies. SCANNER will connect diverse healthcare delivery settings with secure infrastructure that utilizes data collected at the point of care. Policies for data sharing will range from sharing of de-identified records to sharing aggregate results. The network will have a main node that manages policies, distributes queries, aggregates results, and maintains trust and security (authentication, authorization, auditing, etc). Each site will maintain a node that contains data from that site. The network will support retrospective analyses, prospective observational studies, clinical trials, and feedback to point-of-care users. Near real-time collection, analysis, and dissemination of results and feedback to the clinician will be enabled by an infrastructure that allows data to be exchanged according to policies specified by individuals and institutions.
Internship Hours Per Week: 20 hours

Project Title: HPWREN – High Performance Wireless Research Education Network – Smartphone Sensor Research Project

Project Overview
The High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) is interested in involving one or undergraduate students in applications development for Smartphones (basically "wearable computers"). Of most interest is the open Android platform (e.g., a Motorola Droid). Examples are graphical displays of sensor data, such as from deployed meteorological stations.
Internship Hours Per Week: 10- 15 hours

Project Title: User Behavior Study for Schedulers

Project Overview
Understanding the behavior of user base will allow the design of better job schedulers. In previous studies, it has been shown that the user behavior correlates best with the response time of their jobs. However the decision was based on examining traces containing raw data on jobs that were submitted to real, production-use parallel systems. We plan to explore a different angle by using data mining tools to understand the pattern behind user behavior. Work involved for the student may include data gathering, working with data mining tools to analyze data and help with the simulations. The student participant will also be mentioned in any publication based on the outcome of the research. We encourage students working in the field of computer science or engineering to apply to work in this research.
Internship Hours Per Week: 10- 15 hours

Project Title: Provoke: Researching the use of shared databases on the web for public recommendation and brainstorming systems

Project Overview
CREL's mission is to promote cross-over art-science research on participatory media for education and entertainment (http://crel.calit2.net). In conjunction with Calit2, CREL has developed technologies for public participation in thematic environments, such as performances and online videos and lectures. By combining semantic database technologies with natural language processing and user interaction design, CREL has been successful in creating a system where users of the online event are presented with artificial intelligence driven related information and are able to post questions and obtain answers throughout the event. CREL's system, titled Provoke, emphasizes natural modes of communication among users, or between users and content creators, using tools such as micro-blogs or chats that take place in parallel with a lecture. The system also incorporates other widgets such a moderator driven polls, tag clouds, and image manipulation, to provoke reactions in order to more thoroughly engage users.
Internship Hours Per Week: 10- 15 hours

Project Title: Narrative and Emotional Structure Discovery through Machine Learning Applied to a Large Film and Television Script Database Project Overview
Very large humanities data sets and high performance computing create unique opportunities for multimedia data analytics. Film scripts are a semi-formalized way of representing a story. Recently the importance of story in organization communication and learning has been largely celebrated and many methods are used to introduce more sophisticated structures and additional information into traditional stories. Access to temporal information raises the need to model and associate complex information over time in a manner that is both intuitive, succinct to visualization, and at the same time precise enough to capture structures that are meaningful for a specific domain, genre, style, or expertise. Moreover, contents originating in one medium—cinema, television, game, online—film and drama series are increasingly migrated to another, with audio and video clips being reused, remixed and recombined to create alternative meanings. Analysis of narrative in text and media requires establishing a web of inter-relations between multi-varied and mixed numeric and symbolic data whose evolution need to be traced over time. Promising direction in this respect is one of modeling semantics via geometry and topology of information. The starting point is embedding media objects, such as words in a scene of a film script or features in a segment of video or audio stream, in a metric space.
Internship Hours Per Week: 10- 15 hours

Project Title: Renewable Energy / Microgrid System Analysis Project

Project Overview
UCSD is an owner-operator of a 45 MW peak load microgrid with multiple renewable and non-renewable energy generation resources, significant energy storage, and a sophisticated monitoring for controlling flex-demand loads. UCSD seeks to elevate its Smart Grid to a level of global excellence as a holistic, planned community that balances energy infrastructure with that of biodiversity, transportation, water efficiency, waste stream management, Green House Gas (GHG) reduction, telecommunications, security and disaster preparedness. The fundamental goal is to advance the understanding of the complex dynamics that drive community-scale, end-use energy demand, and associated local and global air emissions; to apply this knowledge to generate planning methods and community design models and municipal processes enabling practitioners to build energy-efficient, low- carbon development projects; and to resolve market barriers and risks impeding integration of energy- efficient technologies into development projects through energy-development industry collaboration.
Internship Hours Per Week: 20 hours

Project Title: Developing an Informed Consent Ontology for the iDASH (integrating Data for analysis, Anonymization, and SHaring) Project

Project Overview
The iDASH project will create a National Center for Biomedical Computing that develops new algorithms, open-source tools, and computational infrastructure and services that enable biomedical and behavioral researchers to integrate Data for analysis, Anonymization, and Sharing. A multitude of research questions exist that cannot be addressed adequately by viewing data from a single healthcare institution, and concerns about privacy when sharing data add a significant barrier to research progress. iDASH will address this fundamental challenge by providing a secure, privacy-preserving environment in which researchers can analyze genomic, transcriptomic, and highly annotated phenotypic data. iDASH will focus on privacy protection through anonymization, data simulation, and an informed consent management system. It will concentrate on data analysis through the development of new tools for data annotation and integration across temporal and spatial dimensions and develop algorithms for rare event detection and risk adjustment. This project is a starting point for the development of new tools that will advance three biologically-based projects which span the molecular-individual-population spectrum: (1) molecular phenotyping of Kawasaki Disease, (2) surveillance of anticoagulation agents, and (3) individualized intervention to enhance physical activity.
Internship Hours Per Week: 20 hours

Project Title: New QM/MM Approaches for High Performance Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Condensed Phase Biological Systems

Project Overview
This REHS opportunity is set up to be an integral part of our ongoing effort to develop an extensible interface for mixed quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM/MM) molecular dynamics (MD) simulations that combines the AMBER (http://www.ambermd.org) MD software engine with quantum chemistry programs like ADF (http://www.scm.com), GAMESS () and TeraChem (http://www.petachem.com). The availability of such an interface improves the accuracy and range of applicability of MD simulations that are available to researchers that are using the AMBER MD software package. This will support research into the reaction paths of condensed phase enzymes having benefits across multiple fields including drug design, protein engineering and biofuel research. The REHS intern will contribute at various stages during the project including software development, testing of the implementation and validation calculations on local compute resources including GPU clusters, the Triton compute resource (http://tritonresource.sdsc.edu/) and a variety of TeraGrid (http://www.teragrid.org) supercomputing platforms.
Internship Hours Per Week: 10- 15 hours

Project Title: Exploring the Uncanny Valley

Project Overview
Artificial agents such as humanoid robots and animated 3D characters are actively being developed for use in various domains such as entertainment, retail, education, and healthcare. But how should artificial agents be designed? It may seem like a good idea to make artificial agents look as human-like as possible, especially if they will be used in social settings. However, we soon encounter a phenomenon called the "uncanny valley": As an agent's appearance is made more human-like, people's reactions to it becomes more positive and empathetic, until a point at which the increasing human-likeness leads to the agent being considered repulsive, disturbing, or "zombie-like". For example, many viewers found the film Polar Express creepy, whereas Avatar received more positive evaluations. Despite significant anecdotal evidence, there is little scientific data to characterize the uncanny valley. In our lab we are exploring the uncanny valley using various different methods such as perceptual experiments, physiological recording (GSR, heart rate), and neuroimaging.
Internship Hours Per Week: 15- 20 hours

3D Modeling Intern for the Drama in the Delta Game

Project Overview
This project seeks to recreate the segregated society and cultural activities at two Japanese American internment camps during World War II in an interactive gaming environment. The interdisciplinary research will involve students from Computer Science, Communication and Theatre and Dance. The study will develop the Jerome and Rohwer camp sites in southeast Arkansas. This study would consist of game level and game play design using Torque game engine as well as 3D modeling using Maya software. The students will learn and apply game development and 3D modeling in this project. The intern will create and modify 3D models and avatars to be used in the game.
Internship Hours Per Week: 15 – 20 hours

Game Development Intern for the Drama in the Delta Game

Project Overview
This project seeks to recreate the segregated society and cultural activities at two Japanese American internment camps during World War II in an interactive gaming environment. The interdisciplinary research will involve students from Computer Science, Communication and Theatre and Dance. The study will develop the Jerome and Rohwer camp sites in southeast Arkansas. This study would consist of game level and game play design using Torque game engine as well as 3D modeling using Maya software. The students will learn and apply game development and 3D modeling in this project. The intern will work on developing a game in coordination with a 3D modeler using the Torque 3d Game Engine.
Internship Hours Per Week: 15 – 20 hours

Video Editing for the Web Deployment of Scientific Visualizations

Project Overview
Visservices at SDSC produces high quality visualizations for various projects around the nation. These visualizations are often delivered in form of movies to the scientists and also used for education and outreach purposes. This project will enable the student to engage in transcoding of existing videos using modern codecs for web deployment. Key aspect of this work will be to determine adequate video resolution, codec choice and detailed configuration settings for use with scientific visualization content.
Internship Hours Per Week: 15 – 20 hours

The Application Process - How to Apply

For detailed internship opportunity descriptions and to download an application, please visit:
http://education.sdsc.edu/teachertech

Questions?

If you have any questions about the application process, please contact Ange Mason, SDSC Education and Outreach, via phone at 858 534-5064 or email at amason@ucsd.edu.