Author: John Kunze

Virtual (or in person) National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduate research opportunity @ the Metadata Research Center, Drexel University, as part of the Harnessing (HDR) Institute for Data Driven Dynamical Design (ID4)

Dates: Mid-June through Mid-September 
(Flexibility with start date, and opportunity to continue work over Fall ‘24 term.) 

REU stipend: $5,500

Deadline: Rolling basis (Friday, June 1st for first consideration)

Contacts: Interested applicants, please send a resume and brief statement of interest (1 paragraph) indicating why you would like to participate in the REU program. Please send your application to:

• Senior Research Associate John Kunze: jakkbl@gmail.com
• Professor Mat Kelly: mrk335@drexel.edu 
• Professor Jane Greenberg: jg3243@drexel.edu

REU Project title: Materials Science Vocabulary Building: Establishing a YAMZ Portal

Project overview and description: Agreement on terminology is critical for human and machine communication supporting scientific research. Additionally, shared vocabulary provides a necessary foundation of data and metadata standards, as well as the basis for labels in machine learning pipelines. This REU project will develop and enhance YAMZ.net by creating a domain-specific portal for materials science and exploring AI integration. YAMZ is a general purpose crowdsourced, online dictionary using reputation-based voting to support community discussion and consensus. Project REUs will:

• Develop and test the domain specific portal in the materials science subdomain
• Explore and pilot integrating ChatGPT for drawing in definitions
• Document project procedures to enable a generalizable model that can, on demand, present users with a constrained view (or portal) restricted just to terms from the materials science subdomain
• Collaborate with project mentors and project staff on a scholarly output (e.g., conference poster, presentation, research paper)

REU applicants for this project should have

• Exposure and instruction in at least one of the following disciplines: computer science, data science, chemistry, engineering, physics, and/or materials science
• Interest in semantic systems (terminology/vocabulary) and their value for representation, machine learning, and AI
• Knowledge of the value of data standards for communicating human to human, human to machine, and machine to machine 
• Knowledge of database and data science software (SQL, Tableau, Orange, etc.)
• Python, Flask or similar web framework, or other coding experience

Applicant restrictions

• Must be a non-Drexel undergraduate (not graduated)
• May work remotely or onsite
• Must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident of the United States or its possessions

Research Goals

• Advance YAMZ.net features supporting domain specific portals (e.g., tagging, group ownership of terms and portals).
• Explore and pilot AI integration into YAMZ.net.
• Develop ways for domain-specific communities to be mostly self-sufficient in creating and managing portals.

Learning Goals

• Gain R&D experience with a working online dictionary, and understand tradeoffs between domain-agnostic and domain-specific portals
• Advance semantic research and data science/computer science skills
• Obtain a better understanding of the complexity of questions surrounding terminology agreement and its importance for scientific communication and research