More than seventy students presented 32 research projects spanning smart cities, wireless systems, and applied artificial intelligence.
WINLAB’s Summer Internship Program concluded its 23rd consecutive year on August 6, 2026, with a public Open House at which more than seventy interns presented 32 research projects to peers, families, faculty, and industry visitors.
The 2026 cohort brought together undergraduate and graduate students from universities across the country along with high school students from New Jersey. Over roughly ten weeks, from late May to early August, the interns worked in team-based research groups under faculty mentorship, meeting weekly to report progress and exchange ideas.
Projects spanned the breadth of WINLAB’s research portfolio. Several teams advanced CityOS, an effort to build a privacy-preserving operating system for the connected city, while others worked on immersive and human-centered computing, including the AR Mural platform and embodied XR systems for sensorimotor interaction. The Self-Driving Vehicular Project entered its eighth year, and new efforts ranged from AI-driven communication discovery for lunar surface rovers to green communications infrastructure for a solar-powered mesh network. Elsewhere in the cohort, teams pursued quantum-inspired computing for wireless, satellite-spectrum coexistence in the FR3 band, and efficient AI paired with battery-free backscatter sensing.
Much of the work ran on the COSMOS testbed, which supports both indoor and outdoor city-scale experimentation, giving students hands-on time with software-defined radios, edge-cloud computing, and real deployed infrastructure.
“WINLAB gave me the opportunity to showcase my technical skills through working on a real project that affects the world. I’m grateful for the valuable experience I was able to acquire.”
— Ansel Kurien, 2026 intern
The 2026 program was supported by the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3, an NSF Engineering Research Center), the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, a generous donation from nVerses Capital, and Rutgers University internal sources.
Full project list and Open House details: https://www.cosmos-lab.org/wiki/public/summer/2026/oh2026