What can be considered undergraduate research in Computer Science?

-The school which i am attending does is not research oriented. I will graduate with my Bachelors of Science in Computer Science by 2013 and I plan to apply to Graduate school. So I am entering my Junior year and I want to begin conducting some sort of research in order to help my chances of getting into a good grad school. But I am not sure what would be considered research. Would I have to come up with completely new data? Or would I be able to study and write a paper on something which has already been studied, and call that research?



Topics which interest me:



Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (I have taken an advanced course which discusses Clustering Algorithms, Genetic Algorithms, Support Vector Machines, and Dimensionality Reduction)



Software Engineering

Algorithms

Computer GraphicsDo you have experience in coding and writing programs? Have you written a program before? I suggest you discuss research experience and possible internships with an advisor at your school. You never know, they may have a friend at a research university looking for an undergrad next summer. Also, if you are good with coding and program writting a biology lab may like to snatch you up to do some analysis for them.



And you can apply to the REU Summer Intership Programs(http://www.ams.org/programs/students/und鈥?/a> and http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?鈥?/a> This is the internship program that I went through. I strongly suggest you try to apply, do not let the titles make you feel like you aren't good enough... its a learning experience and most people in the REU program do not have experience either.



To answer your earlier question, I applied to 2 MS (UGA and CSU Sac) programs and 4 PhD programs (OSU, UCR, UCD, MSU). I was accepted into all of them. I choose UCR because I really liked the projects going on here. They have a nice Bioinformatics program with a good Genomics core facility and a lot of resources for students.