The ASCENT Summer Program

The Advanced Summer Curriculum for Emerging Network Technologies (ASCENT) is a research program for highly-motivated undergraduate and graduate students who want to work on interesting research projects in networking (yet also want to make some decent money) while working in the picturesque and mountainous town of Los Alamos.

(Note: We actually prefer and encourage students to come in the fall and/or spring but realize that most students prefer summer internships.)

The goal of this program is to challenge students to make ASCENTs in all aspects of life, including:

Intellectual Ascents

• For undergraduates and first-year graduate students, this means making the ascent from "textbook" knowledge and limited research exposure to learning about how to do research.
• For more senior graduate students, it means building on your abilities to do better research and to learn how to play the "proposal-writing" game.

Social Ascents

• The ASCENT research program brings a sizable number of interns together with the hope of creating a social environment where research interaction is encouraged and a sense of comraderie is developed.

Physical Ascents

• During the 1st Annual ASCENT, many of the intern participants serendipitously took an interest in the hiking activities of their mentors. What started as easy 30-minute hikes to Window Rock and Jemez Falls evolved into longer hikes to San Antonio Hot Springs and Santa Fe Baldy (12,426 feet above sea level). Other activities that interns voluntarily participated in included whitewater rafting, trail running, cycling, and swing dancing.
• Check out the RADIANT Photo Album for pictures from previous years' ASCENT trips and adventures.
• This aspect of ASCENT is purely optional for intern participants.

Accomplishments of the first incarnation of ASCENT include a prestigious publication for one of the participants and potential thesis topics for all of the participants.

1st Annual ASCENT (ASCENT 1999)

The first instantiation of this program included the participation of six interns from three universities. Each research project was tailored to an intern's abilities as well as research interests. The research areas addressed by this crop of interns include network traffic characterization, ST (an ANSI OS-bypass protocol), real-time multimedia datagram protocol, and software tools to analyze network traces.

2nd Annual ASCENT (ASCENT 2000)

The 2nd Annual ASCENT program hosted seven interns from five different universities: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Texas at Austin, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Texas A&M University, and Northwestern University. The hard work by this crop of interns resulted in three submitted publications as well as a simulation prototype of a protocol and an analysis tool for network traffic.

3rd Annual ASCENT (ASCENT 2001)

The 3rd Annual ASCENT hosted three interns from three different universities: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Maryland at College Park, and University of Wisconsin at Madison.

4th Annual ASCENT (ASCENT 2002)

The 4th Annual ASCENT hosted four interns from four different universities: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, St. John's College, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin at Madison.

5th Annual ASCENT (ASCENT 2003)

The 5th Annual ASCENT hosted five interns from five different universities: Brigham Young University, Columbia University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Maryland, University of Texas at Dallas.

6th Annual ASCENT (ASCENT 2004)

The 6th Annual ASCENT hosted five interns from four different universities: Johns Hopkins University, University of California at Davis, University of California at Riverside, University of California at San Diego.

7th Annual ASCENT (ASCENT 2005)

The 7th Annual ASCENT hosted five interns from five different universities: North Carolina State University, Northwestern University, The Ohio State University, University of California at Davis, University of Illinois at Chicago.

8th Annual ASCENT (ASCENT 2006)

For the 8th Annual ASCENT, we intend to hire two to three interns. If you are interested in applying to this program, please send a resume (in postscript, pdf, or Word format) to radiant-resumes@lanl.gov.

For more information on ASCENT, contact Wu-chun Feng at feng@lanl.gov@.

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