Research Project

You will design and carry out a quarter-long research project (done in teams). I hope that these projects will lead to published papers. The timeline for the projects is as follows:

  • 1/18: inform me of your group's membership. Groups should generally consist of two or three people. Your project partner will have a substantial effect on your experience in this course, so choose carefully.
  • 1/18: inform me of your project choice. This will be an email with a brief description of what you plan on doing for the quarter.
  • 1/30: project proposals are due (you can find more information here). Your proposal should state the problem your project will address, the motivation for why this is an interesting problem, the goal of your project, the relationship between your project and other work, the plan and methodology for your project, and the resources needed to carry out your project. Include a set of incremental milestones that you will achieve in carrying out the project and a schedule for meeting these milestones.
  • 2/20: Midterm report due. You should have some preliminary results at this point and should include an introduction, related work, preliminary design, and expected final results.
  • 3/6 - 3/15: Project presentations. You can find more information about presentations in class.
  • 3/19: Final project due.

Project groups should be 2-3 members. Any other group size needs explicit approval by the professor.

This quarter I am not going to give out project ideas. You are responsible for coming up with a research idea by yourself, but I encourage you to start this process early and to solicit feedback from me.

For any part of the project you turn in, you must usenix two-column formatting. For an example, feel free to start from the a latex template or you can use the latex template that I personally use for my papers (this one includes a makefile) latex-example.tgz. Note: You are required to use LaTeX in this class.

About Latex, for those of you who are not familiar with it, try to read tutorials like this: http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/LaTeXPrimer/

For windows users, we suggest using MikTeX or Cygwin, or http://www.latexeditor.org/index.html that makes using LaTeX a little easier.

Writing an intro

There are many different ways to write a good introduction. I recommend you find your favorite papers and reverse engineer an outline for the introduction to get an idea of how other people write introductions. This is my approach to writing introductions:
  • 1-2 paragraphs about what problem you are solving and why it is important.
  • 1-2 paragraphs about how other people have solved this problem and how they fall short.
  • 1 paragraph (optional) what is difficult about this problem.
  • 1-2 paragraphs about your plan on why it is better than current approaches.
  • 1 paragraph to summarize results, or for your project proposals summarize your anticipated results.

Project proposal

Your project proposal should include the following sections:
  • Introduction.
  • Timeline of what you plan to accomplish and by when.
  • Evaluation plan.
  • Anticipated results.
  • You are required to use LaTeX for your project proposals and you must submit it in PDF format.

You will be graded on the clarity and quality of your presentation, not on your research ideas. Grammar and spelling mistakes will affect your grade. I expect you to have a clear problem statement with citations that back up your claims as to why this is an important problem, a classification of the most closely related work and an explanation of why it does not solve the problem you are interested in, and a clear explanation of what you plan on doing and why you think it will solve the problem you are interested in. Overall you should turn in an introduction that rivals the quality of the introductions we read in class. The class staff will provide written feedback on your research ideas to give you a suggestions on how to proceed for the remainder of the semester.