If you want to do a CSE 523/524 project, or a CSE 599 project in
the Security Lab, send mail to the lab faculty, providing the
following information:
- A short resume in postscript, PDF or plaintext. (Do not send me
any Office documents.) This resume should include: your UG background,
institution, GPA (or percentage of marks obtained), GRE scores
(all three of them), courses that you have taken at SUNYSB and the
grades obtained.
- Information about your background -- any papers or research that you
have undertaken before, any strengths or weaknesses in terms of
UG preparation.
- Programming experience, indicating what languages you have written
nontrivial programs, and a description of programming projects
that you have done.
- A description of your interests -- what are you looking for in
a project?
On receiving this information, I will schedule a meeting with you to
describe possible projects.
If you are interested in doing your M.S. project (CSE 523/524)
at the laboratory, you should know the following:
- Generally, the projects at the Security Laboratory are substantial,
and benefit students greatly. Students learn substantial new material
and significantly improve their programming skills. Naturally,
accomplishing this requires students to put in a good deal of effort
on their project. So, if you are looking for projects with light
workloads, you would be better off looking elsewhere.
- A majority of M.S. projects previously done at the Security Lab
have led to publications in good conferences. (Please visit
our publications page or
M.S. project reports page for more
details.) In order to incorporate the degree of research required to
make the work publishable, it is necessary that a fair amount of your
time in the project be spent in doing (a) background research, and (b)
refining the problem statement and defining its scope. So you
should be prepared to start with a loose definition of the project,
and work towards refining it during your 523 and/or early part of 524.
- 523/524 projects generally take 1.5 to 2 semesters (or one semester
plus a summer) to complete. Students
often register for 523 in a semester and do very little work -- so, the
above figure applies from the time the student starts spending
significant effort on the project.
- Research funding is available for a select subset of M.S. projects,
and are awarded on a competitive basis.
