Master’s Research at Khoury College
Encouraging student pioneers
Khoury College master’s students participate in a full spectrum of research across the Northeastern Global Campus system, from Boston to Vancouver. Project-based courses and master’s theses provide a curriculum-based format, and some campuses, such as Vancouver, include an industry-partnered research capstone as part of their program.
Throughout the year, there is programming to inform students about research activities and opportunities happening at the university and beyond. One major research experience is the prestigious Khoury Research Apprenticeship program.
Capstone projects: Uncovering what’s possible
Khoury master’s students in the MS Data Science and MS Cybersecurity programs have capstone embedded in the curriculum, and completing a semester-long capstone project that synthesizes different learning areas and solves a real-world problem is part of every Vancouver graduate student’s journey.
Research Apprenticeship program
Started in fall of 2019, the Khoury Research Apprenticeship is a unique program held in the Fall and Spring semesters that provides current master’s students the opportunity to participate in relevant research projects while being mentored and supported by faculty advisors. The Khoury Research Apprenticeship is a hands-on opportunity to explore your current research interests, or to pave a pathway to a future PhD upon the completion of your master’s. The experience is capped off with a research showcase that highlights what you’ve learned and celebrates your work.
Faculty and academic advisors nominate students who demonstrate strong academic skills and have shown affinity and talent for research. Faculty present proposals for research projects which apprenticeship recipients can join. Once nominated, students apply to the projects they are interested in, followed by an interview with the corresponding faculty member and a committee review to finalize the selections.
A sample of 2024 Apprenticeship participants and their projects:
- Ryan Heminway: Designing Neural Networks with Evolution
- Rachana Kallada Jayaraj: Automated Failure Recovery of Coordinators in a Serverless File System
- Mao Zhang: Teaching the Graphics Pipeline Using Interactive Matlab Apps
Master’s thesis
Khoury College master’s students have the opportunity to pursue empirical research on a focused topic that goes beyond a class project or internship. The research may take root in a projects course or during a research assistantship in one of our labs. Students typically decide to do a master’s thesis in order to consolidate and disseminate their knowledge.
The master’s thesis consists of eight semester hours of research, culminating in the master’s thesis. While it will be your responsibility to find a thesis advisor, you can get help and advice from an academic advisor in the graduate program on reaching out to individual faculty and understanding the thesis process and policies.
Examples of master’s thesis topics include:
- ICS/SCADA security research
- An instrumentation framework for understanding the usage and performance of data structures
- Deep multi-agent reinforcement learning
- Language generation and instruction following
2024 Graduate Research Award winner: Zhiyuan (David) Yang
With a unique undergraduate background in landscape architecture, Yang hit the ground running at Khoury College during his Align Master’s program. He worked with three different faculty to co-author and publish multiple papers in addition to his capstone study. For his capstone course, Yang led a team to develop an innovative zero-shot emotion evaluation system for videos using multi-modal methods and large language models, in which the computer model can estimate emotional intensity of video subjects.
2023 Graduate Research Award Winner: Sumukh Vasisht Shankar
After completing a bachelor’s degree in information science and engineering in India, Sumukh Vasisht Shankar came to Khoury College with a clear goal: to get himself involved in research.
Sumukh was accepted into the Research Apprenticeship Program and spent the following year working with Khoury Professor Robin Walters and Rutgers Professor Jon Singer to build deep learning models exploring the relationship between the heat profile of a dynamic spatial light modulator and the pattern of reflected light it produces.
