Research Program for HS Students – Summer 2025
Summer 2024
Summer 2023
Program dates: June 9 – August 1, 2025 (8 weeks)
Apply by submitting MS office form utd.link/csr-app
All Summer Research offerings @ Google sheet utd.link/csr25
We believe that learning coding skills and understanding new technologies is the most productive way to spend summer months for the most high school students. Main challenge with research for HS students is that the advanced level of knowledge is required to understand the research that goes on in our labs & to make any meaningful contribution in short 2 months of Summer.
Scholarship for low income families is made possible by financial support from
Learning to code is like learning to play a musical instrument! It takes a lot of time, patience and practice. Please, please, please do NOT skip the introductory material covered in our summer camps and sign up directly for the research workshops – it will have the opposite effect – your child will lose the self-confidence and decide that Computer Science is not for him/her.
We offer 2 types of research opportunities listed below – every year, a few students get too excited & want to do 2 programs together 🙂 one lab and one workshop OR two workshops (sorry, 2 labs is not allowed). Once the application is processed and the first registration is completed, let us know that you want to do second one too – we will work with you individually & take care of it.
- Intensive Research Internship in CS labs – typically meet IN-PERSON for multiple days per week – limited to students who will be age 16 and up, by the start date (June 9th). Capacity in each lab is very limited – so we will be extremely selective! Selection process & goals are managed by individual labs. We expect each intern to work 20-40 hours per week – it will vary greatly depending on the project or lab. Actual work can vary a lot too: reading research papers, conducting simulations, develop app for specific functionality, etc.
There will be $1000 fee to cover the logistics and compensation for the instructors (we will accommodate the low income families with discounted fees). There will be NO early registration discount or late registration fee for the labs. Once you are selected for Internship, you are expected to register within a week to keep your spot. There will be $50 cancellation fee in case your summer plans change and you can no longer participate in the lab, however you can transfer to a workshop without any additional fee. Warning: We expect the lab intern selection to be highly selective. Do not be disappointed if you don’t get selected. We don’t mean to discourage you, rather we want you to be realistic about the chances. Best wishes! - Summer Research Workshops – Each workshop is run like informal college courses that meets at least twice per week – Fee will be $700 for IN-PERSON attendees and $600 for VIRTUAL attendees (automatic 10% discount until April 1st, $100 late fee kicks in after May 9). If the student is of age 16 and up by the workshop start date (June 9th), (s)he will have the option of attending IN-PERSON or VIRTUAL, younger ones are limited to VIRTUAL mode. All IN-PERSON attendees do have the option to attend VIRTUAL mode on any day, but the students signed up for VIRTUAL mode are limited to that mode. All sessions will be recorded to help the attendees to catch up if any sessions are missed due to other summer commitments – typical goal of each workshop is to end with a final project or paper related to the research area. However, we will NOT push the students to do them – we will enable them by providing the necessary support & guide them towards their goals. Once you are selected for this Summer Research program, you are expected to register within a week to keep your spot. There will be $50 cancellation fee, in case your summer plans change, you can no longer attend the workshop and you decide to cancel the workshop. However, if you are admitted to a lab later, we will be happy to transfer you to the lab without the cancellation fee. We also have 8-week Deep-dive AI workshop which runs for the whole day for 8 weeks! See the details below.
Benefits
In addition to a great learning experience, all participants will get Summer Internship T-shirt, Completion certificate & an experience letter detailing what was covered in the workshop. Students who do impressive work can also request for a recommendation letter as well. NEW for Summer 2025: We will give awards & special certificates for the top 3 research report/presentations! Considering the large # of attendees in our program, we will use 2-phase approach to select the winners (AI workshop will be excluded since we have separate top 3 awards for it already). we will ask each lab/workshop lead to nominate 1 or 2 submissions for the awards and we will select the final awardees from that pool. Both individuals and teams can submit their final report/presentation for the awards, with a virtual presentation (we will send out more details in July 1st week).
Who can apply?
These research opportunities are ONLY for passionate & highly motivated advanced level high school students (ideally students finishing 10th and 11th grade – IN-PERSON attendance is limited to students who are of age 16 or higher, by the start date June 9th) who are thrilled to dig deep and gain more knowledge with minimal guidance. If you are hoping for a lot of hand-holding along the way, these opportunities are not for you! 🙁 Especially for lab internships, we expect you to have good background knowledge in the research areas you are interested in.
If you do not live in Dallas area and want to attend these research programs IN-PERSON, you need to find a place to stay near UT Dallas & make arrangements on your own! Sorry, UT Dallas does not provide the residential stay option for minors using our dorms.
Google sheet utd.link/csr25 contains the listing of current Summer Research offerings. You can also visit UTDCS department research page to understand research that goes on in our research labs/institutes/centers. BTW, professors’ schedules are extremely busy – please do NOT email them directly – reach out to Dr. Jey at jeyv@utdallas.edu if there are any questions.
8 week Deep-dive AI Workshop – June 9 to August 1, 2025
Application process through https://sites.utdallas.edu/k12/research.
UTD CS is thrilled to offer Artificial Intelligence Workshop for 8 weeks for Advanced Level High School Students – we are limiting to IN-PERSON attendees who will be age 16 and up by the workshop start date (June 9th). This workshop actually runs Monday to Friday for all 8 weeks (9:30am-4pm) with lunch break for an hour. Supervision will be provided from 9am to 4:30pm. We will send a camp completion certificate to each camper. We will also send a write-up/recommendation letter based on the student’s performance.
Pre-requisites: Familiarity with Python programming, and high school level math. Willing to invest time & energy to learn advanced level coding, data analysis skills and apply them to a real life project.
UTD CS doctorate & graduate students will teach this workshop, with Dr. Anurag Nagar as the faculty lead. He typically teaches at least 1 session every week.
Registration fee is $1600 (automatic 10% discount until April 1st, $100 late fee kicks in after May 9), very reasonable for 8 week intense program like this one, we understand that the low income families may find it hard to pay it – as a public state institution, our goal is never to turn away any interested Texas students due to money. We offer 50% discount for low-income families. Send any meaningful documentation to csk12@utdallas.edu to apply. See the bottom of utdallas.edu/k12 for more details.
In case you change your mind later & decide not to attend this program, there is just $50 cancellation fee – remaining amount will be refunded back to you. Also, pro-rated amount will be refunded if you decide to quit in the middle of the program.
List of Topics
- Introduction to Python programming, tools for data analysis such as NumPy, pandas, graphics.
- Getting started with data processing – various file formats, loading into data frames and performing basic statistical operations.
- Introduction to machine learning, with examples and real life scenarios.
- AI/ML model building – decision trees, neural networks, etc.
- Deep Neural Nets using TensorFlow
- Convolutional Neural Nets (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Nets (RNN)
- Model Evaluation – accuracy, error, ROC curve
- Project Activities
The University of Texas at Dallas is committed to providing an educational, living and working environment that is welcoming, respectful and inclusive of all members of the university community. The University prohibits unlawful discrimination against a person because of their race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, or veteran status. Participation in our Coding Camps/Workshops/Webinars is open to all interested parties.
