Advisor
Christof Teuscher
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
Summer 2026
Abstract
The 2026 Summer Proceedings bring together research conducted by undergraduate students participating in three complementary programs at Portland State University: the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (NSF REU) site, Computational Modeling Serving Portland; the alternative Research Experiences for Undergraduates (altREU) program, Designing, Programming, and Using Computers to Benefit Society; and the Teuscher Lab internship program.
The NSF REU is a fully virtual, 10-week program centered on computational modeling that serves Portland and the greater region. Students begin with two weeks of intensive training in computational modeling, followed by eightweeks of mentored research with faculty, research collaborators, and community partners. During the training period, students study dynamical systems, networks, agent-based modeling, and neural networks, then apply these concepts through instructional materials and hands-on mini-projects. Eight exemplary student-created materials from the 2026 training program appear in Part I of this volume before the formal research chapters.
The altREU provides a flexible, fully online alternative to traditional undergraduate research, giving students an active role in shaping team-based research projects. The Teuscher Lab internship program complements these experiences by connecting students with mentorship and research opportunities across computing, engineering, technology, environmental science, and related interdisciplinary fields.
Together, these programs produced 35 research chapters spanning artificial intelligence, data and trustworthy systems; robotics, sensing and applied engineering; environmental and earth sciences; and specialized neural architectures and hardware. The projects address topics ranging from vision-language models, multilingual retrieval, cybersecurity, genomic privacy, and accessible artifcial intelligence to robotics, biomedical sensing, wildfre preparedness, environmental justice, urban air quality, freshwater systems, green infrastructure, neuromorphic hardware, reservoir computing, and unconventional physical computing.
Rights
Copyright © 2026 by the respective chapter authors, except where otherwise indicated. Individual chapters remain the intellectual work and responsibility of their named authors.
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/45172
Citation Details
Asghar, Fatima (editor) and Cheema, Muhammad (editor), "Summer Proceedings 2026" (2026). altREU Projects. 19.
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/45172
Description
Funding
NSF REU Site students were supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 2244551.
The altREU program was supported by Portland State University.
tlab interns were supported in part by the Daimler Truck Portland Professorship, by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 2318139, by the Intel REU program, and by the MICRON internship program.
Computational resources used in this work were supported by the Oregon Regional Computing Accelerator (ORCA), funded by NSF CC*-2346732.