Faculty Mentor: Stan Franklin

Faculty Mentor's Department: Computer Science-Institute for Intelligent Systems

Telephone Number and/or E-mail: 678-1341; franklin@memphis.edu

Project Description: How Minds Work: An autonomous agent senses and acts upon its environment in the service of its own agenda. An autonomous agent with human-like cognitive capabilities is called a cognitive agent. Our Cognitive Computing Research Group (CCRG) http://ccrg.cs.memphis.edu/ revolves around the design and implementation of cognitive software agents. Like the Roman god Janus, the cognitive software projects have two faces, the science face and the engineering face. The science side fleshes out the global workspace theory of consciousness and other theories from cognitive science and neuroscience producing the LIDA model, a conceptual model of how minds work.  The engineering side explores architectural designs for software information agents that promise more flexible, more human-like intelligence within their domains. The fleshed out conceptual and computational theory is yielding hopefully testable hypotheses about human cognition. The architectures and mechanisms that underlie consciousness and intelligence in humans can be expected to yield information agents that learn continuously, adapt readily to dynamic environments, and behave flexibly and intelligently when faced with novel and unexpected situations.

An online tutorial on the LIDA model can be found at: http://csrg.cs.memphis.edu/

Requirements for Student Applicants: some programming experience, preferably in Java, would be a help, but not necessary.

Starting Date: anytime

Method of Compensation (Volunteer, Academic Credit, or Stipend): Any of these would be possible.

Faculty Mentor: Lan Wang

Faculty Mentor's Department: Computer Science, http://netlab.cs.memphis.edu

Telephone Number and/or E-mail Address: 901-678-2727, lanwang@memphis.edu

Project Description: We welcome undergraduate
students to our Networking Research Lab (NetLab). NetLab's research areas include: fault-tolerance and security in network protocol design; network measurement techniques; scalable network simulator
design; routing protocol design; and sensor network protocols.

Requirements for Student applicants: good programming skills and good problem solving skills (unix experience is a plus).

Starting Date: Anytime

Method of Compensation: Volunteer, Academic Credit, or Stipend (all are possible depending on the students' experience level).