SuperUROP: Showcasing students' research work in progress
If one overarching message emerged from the 2018 SuperUROP Showcase, it was this: MIT undergraduates can do just about anything. The lively poster session, which marked the halfway point in the annual Advanced Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (SuperUROP), featured more than 130 poster presentations by students on topics ranging from DNA-based memory storage to adaptive flight control and from image recognition to the automated correction of grammatical errors in Japanese. Capping the event was the SuperUROP Community Dinner, which featured a keynote address by Tom Leighton PhD ’81, the CEO and co-founder of Akamai, a $2.5 billion technology company that was born at MIT. Leighton’s talk, “The Akamai Story: From Theory to Practice,” was designed to inspire the undergraduates in attendance. It centered, as Leighton put it, on “taking a UROP project and forming a company and having some success with it.” SuperUROP builds on the success of MIT’s flagship UROP program. While traditional UROP experiences last just...