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Budget Explanation

We are requesting support for 10 students to participate in this REU site. Each student will receive a $5,500 stipend over 12 months. The stipend will be paid as $2,000 per student during the summer term, and they will be expected to work full-time on their projects. During the Fall and Spring, each student will be paid $1,750 per semester, and will be expected to work part time on their projects.

Professors Shah and Bowyer will teach the majority of the summer short course, supervise a larger number of the REU participants, and handle a large portion of the organizational/administrative workload. Each of them will receive release during the academic year (one course for Professor Shah and one half course for Professor Bowyer) from their respective Department as a matching contribution for this project.

A graduate student at UCF will be the coordinator (budgeted at $12,000 for the calendar year); he or she will work over the summer to help support the short course and will be available as a resource person over the academic year to help students from all the institutions via e-mail. An amount of $9,000 is requested for travel expenses, only $4,000 of this from NSF. (This is only $400 per REU participant.) The majority of this is meant to support the cost of students attending some professional conference as outlined in the proposal. A part of this will also be used to bring outside speakers to visit UCF and USF and meet with the REU students. (For example, these funds would pay local expenses for a speaker from the IEEE distinguished lecturer program.) Supplies are budgeted at $8,000 (Only $3,000 from NSF; $300 per student per year), meant to cover costs of books, copying, disks, software, conference proceedings and preparation of technical reports for all of the participants throughout the calendar year. For the first year $10,000 to purchase two Sun Workstations for the UCF Computer Vision lab is also included. These two workstations will exclusively be reserved for the REU participants. Since the undergraduate research population will significantly increase with this project, these two additional workstations are needed. The REU participants will also have access to other workstations in the lab, which they will share with Ph.D. and M.S. students.

The proposed REU site project will be jointly funded by NSF, UCF, and USF. UCF will provide $21,193 per year in matching funds. This will take the form of a one course per year reduction in teaching load for Professor Shah ($8,193), two semesters of support for the graduate student coordinator ($8,000), $2,500 for travel and $2,500 for supplies. In addition, UCF will also provide $10,000 during the first year for two Sun Workstations needed for undergraduate research in the Computer Vision lab at UCF. USF will provide $13,467 per year in matching funds. This will take the form of one half course per year reduction in teaching load for Professor Bowyer ($5,967) and $7,500 contribution towards other costs for the USF portion of the budget. In summary, matching funds from UCF and USF constitute approximately 33% of the total project cost. This substantial level of matching at a time when State Universities are facing significant budget pressures clearly demonstrates the strong institutional commitment to this project.