Projects & Activities

Summer Research
During the summer, students work directly with Cornell faculty or at other institutions on a range of projects. Recent projects include:

• Developing software that allows medical researchers to share private patient information
• Enhancing educational software to automatically grade code fragments written in Java
• Data encryption studies at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland
• Building databases for an agricultural processing plant
• Creating a tool to analyze large volumes of wind speed data

Internships
We encourage our students to explore career options through internships, and Cornell's block plan makes it possible to do so even during the school year. Back on campus, students report on their work so that their peers may also benefit from the experience. We have received exceptional reports from students who completed recent internships at:

• a cutting-edge biotech firm
• a global avionics corporation
• a company that distributes food nationwide
• a major provider of data-processing services to the federal government
• a large publisher of magazines
• a leader in the design of medical imaging equipment

Student Symposium
The annual Cornell Student Symposium provides an opportunity for students to present the result of their research and internships to the wider Cornell community. Students also exhibit and describe independent projects involving robotics, search optimization, date encryption, etc. See our Student Symposium page for abstracts of recent presentations.

International Collegiate Programming Contest
Cornell regularly fields teams at the regional level of the International Collegiate Programming Contest. In 2007, one of our teams finished 32nd out of more than 200 teams from top schools around the Midwest.

Field Trips
We have visited virtual reality laboratories at the University of Iowa and Iowa State University. We have toured engineering offices, testing facilities, and manufacturing lines at the Rockwell-Collins, Intermec, and the Siemens corporations.

IEEE Meetings
Students and professors frequently join meetings of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a professional society, in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. We enjoy dinner and conversation with software engineers, physicists, and electrical engineers who work for the region's high technology firms. For example:

• On September 22, 2005, we heard the University of Iowa's Professor Joe Kearney speak about "Building Simulators and Using Simulators to Study Human Behavior."
• On February 23, 2006, we heard the University of Iowa's Professor Alberto Segre speak about “Medical Informatics: Privacy Preservation—Challenges & Innovations.”
• On April 27, 2006, we heard the University of Iowa's Professor Doug Jones speak about “Elections and Electronic Voting Machines.”
• On September 19, 2006, we heard Clemson University's Professor Michael Pursley speak about “Protocols for Adaptive Modulation and Coding in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks.”

Dinner at the Brown Bottle Restaurant with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.		Exhibition of student Ian McNamara's computer graphics in the college's Peter Paul Luce Gallery.