Trying to Find a Project

[BlakeJustBlake]

So, for the last semester of college as I was a CS major, I didn't do very well (after my first two semesters I ended up with a 1.9GPA) and I was extremely dissatisfied with the CS department I was in (the teachers taught everything way too slow and not very well, it took my teacher last semester a whole semester to discuss basically two topics: linked lists and recursion.) So when I came home for the summer I was about sick of my school and sick of myself being so lazy, so I decided to overhaul my life and get into a routine and start working hard with the goal in mind that I want to go to MIT or Carnegie Mellon for graduate school. Don't rat on me about how impossible that goal may seem, it's not the focus of this and I already know how impossible it may be, I don't really care, at least it's driving me to try hard and I'll end up somewhere better than before.

So one of the things I added into the priority of my life, seeing that if I want to get into a good graduate school one of the big things they're going to want me to know is what I'm doing, they're going to want me to have some research experience. There will be research opportunities at the college I'm transferring to, but to be truly impressive I want to have more. So I want to work on a little personal project. Basically what I'm looking for is somewhere that I can find maybe an overview and the current major work going on in different areas of computer science so that I can find my niche in computer science and start learning more about it on my own and eventually develop some sort of software in that area. So I was looking to see if any of you could help me find this information.

Summary: I'm looking for a web site or various ones, that gives overviews of different areas of computer science and the current major work going on in it.

[jernst]

One way you could find what people are working on is looking through scientific journals, especially if you are interested in graduate school. Most schools provide access to them through the library system. You could try just searching for areas you are interested in and seeing what papers come up. Also looking through profs' web sites usually show what they are working on and you could try searching more on what they have wrote or similar topics if they interest you. Another way you could learn about what new research is going on is by attending any special talks given at your school. Usually at them the person giving the lecture will give some idea about what is going on in the field and related work.

P.S don't get too discouraged by having bad marks, especially if you are just starting. I had pretty bad marks in my first semester but managed to turn it around and now I'm in grad school. Good luck with your studies!

[btiffin]

You are spoilt for choice. Many established up and coming areas need experts (and fledgling experts). Bioinformatics, data mining, tons of GNU/Linux projects need hands and minds - especially in the accessibility arena, environmental impact and optimization, robotics (both entertainment and industrial), gaming, human surveillance, Internet II and IPv6, rocket science, ... spoilt.

imho; get a good grip on C and the assortment of support tools surrounding it, C++ next and then pick up some of the other mainstream areas. Then go for a few of the less common environments just to round things out. And that is just my personal opinion; I don't run a lab or a large corporation so I count myself as somewhat clueless.

Start with google and follow some threads that interest you; the amount of information is vast, overwhelming and totally wicked awesome. Umm, if they still say wicked awesome in Boston

Here's the first one that came up when I googled; computer science research MIT

http://web.mit.edu/research/category/cs.html - spoilt for choice.

Cheers

[BlakeJustBlake]

So I've done a little looking around, with you're help, and I've kind of narrowed down my interests in Computer Science to networking, AI, Security, Distributed Computing and Computer Architecture. I guess that's not exactly too narrowed. So what I want to do now is read some basic writings about each of these topics and see which ones I find further interest in. Then when I've narrowed it down then I'll go further into whatever my choice is.

[jernst]

Sounds good, likely if you take some undergrad courses in the areas you are interested in you will be able to narrow it down even further

[DemonWasp]

Until you have the opportunity to take courses, go to Wikipedia and read the articles. Click on all the links. It's astounding how much you can learn that way.

Networking. You probably already know most of the differences between TCP and UDP, but knowing of a variety of protocols can help. IPv6 is of course a good thing to learn right away too.

AI.
There's a lot of different areas within AI, so you may want to narrow it down from there. From the simple end, there's AIs to make "intelligent" decisions when they consider dozens of variables (slightly more complex than standard programming), to game-level AIs, which have to act in a human-like manner in a well-defined game world to the more complex stuff.

Security.
Honestly here, you're probably best reading a blog I found a while back. I'll try to find it again, but no promises. It was titled "Fallacies in Security" or something similar.

Distributed Computing. You probably already know about BOINC, so I'll spare you that lecture - but you should consider subscribing to their architecture/design discussions (wouldn't know how to do that myself).

Computer Architecture. I really can't say anything, I'm a huge noob in that area.