Research Projects

Project Grading

Deliverables

• Project proposal (Oct 4): 3–5 page project description with 1-inch margins, single column, and 11-pt font.
  • Section 1, Introduction: Motivate the problem you are trying to solve. Include a couple of references of the most recent work in this area.
  • Section 2, Approach: Describe your approach for solving the problem. What is new and interesting about this approach? How is it better than existing work?
  • Section 3, Deliverables: Describe what you hope to accomplish by the end of the semester.
  • Section 4, Schedule: Propose a schedule of milestones, with a 1–2 week granularity. The goal is to have a plan. It is okay to deviate (within reason) from this plan as the semester progresses.
  • References: Paper citations should be in standard ACM/IEEE format.

• Project proposal class presentation (Oct 11): 10 minutes per group, around 4 slides total on 1) Motivation, 2) Approach, 3) Benefits over existing work, 4) Schedule and Milestones

• Project status report (Nov 15): This report will be an early draft of your final project report. Create a template based on the instructions for the final report and include all sections. I expect the following sections to be well written: Abstract, Introduction, Overview of Approach. In this report it should be absolutely clear by now what you're doing in your project.

  Next, the Protocol/Architecture/Design section should have some technical detail on your solution and a high-level architecture of your solution (I want to see that you have started hashing out some of the details), but I won't expect a polished writeup. Include details about what you have so far and what you're planning on completing for the final report. The remaining sections should have some placeholder text (such as bullets) showing that you're at least thinking about what will go in there. Evaluation should include your current plans for evaluation. Related work should contain a sizeable bibliography of papers related to your project.

• Final project report (Dec 6): Conference-quality project report due. 8–10 pages, 1-inch margins, single column, 11-pt font. Suggested outline:
  • Abstract (around 200 words)
  • Introduction (includes references to highly-relevant related work, i.e., state of the art for the problem you are trying to solve)
  • Overview of Approach (a nice and accessible "English" description of your approach)
  • Protocol/Architecture/Design/...
  • Evaluation (don't forget to interpret your data)
  • Discussion (discuss some of the important simplifying assumptions, and suggest possibilities for future work)
  • Related Work ("somewhat related" work goes here; directly related work goes into the Introduction)
  • Conclusions (don't summarize your work here. That's what the abstract was for. Instead provide some philosophical ruminations of your work and future possibilities, i.e., conclusions that you have arrived at as a result of your work.)
  • References

• Final project presentation (Dec 15): 20 minutes followed by 5 minutes of Q&A per group

Late reports?

You have an automatic 4-day extension for each of the project description, progress report, and final report. You will be penalized 25% for every day it is late beyond this extention. You are required to submit satisfactory versions of these reports within 8 days of the deadline to pass the class.

Project ideas