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:

  • 1/22: inform me of your group's membership. Groups should generally consist of 3 or 4 people. Your project partner will have a substantial effect on your experience in this course, so choose carefully.
  • 1/24: inform me of your project choice. This will be an email with a brief description of what you plan on doing for the quarter.
  • 2/7: 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.
  • 3/12 - 3/14: Project presentations. You can find more information about presentations in class.
  • 3/20: Final project due.

Project groups should be 3-4 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.

Final presentation grading

See slides from lecture for more details on what we're expecting. We will grade you on:
  • Clarity and quality of presentation
  • Ability to explain the problem and set the appropriate context
  • Ability to explain the system you built
  • Quality of the live demo
  • How well you handle Q/A

Final project grading

See slides from lecture for more details on what we're expecting. This quarter we're going to use slides and source code as the artifacts that you're going to turn in for your grade. We will grade you on:
  • Code quality. To get points you must include a README file in your repo that outlines the basic structure of your code and how the concepts from your project map to actual code. Also, we're expecting significant contributions in real source code from all group members.
  • Clarity and quality of explanation
  • How significant was the system you built. We've been giving all groups feedback on this during our weekly meetings, so I'm not expecting any surprises here.
  • Result. Basic results will get you most of the points, but we're reserving a few points in this category for exceptional results.

Project meetings

In the second half of this quarter your group will have weekly meetings with Sam and the TA. Before this meeting we expect you to meet as a group and plan your week. These meetings can be short (30 minutes) but you must meet as a group to talk about what you did over the previous week, what you plan to do during the upcoming week, and any issues or problems that you've encountered.

As a part of your grade, before your weekly meeting with the professor you must turn in a document that summarizes your meeting. In particular:

  • You will use Trello to keep an up-to-date list of what everyone is doing. Your Trello board will have a list of tasks divided into four categories: up next (priority order), in progress, blocked, and done.
  • You will submit a short summary for all group members that includes a few sentences about (1) what did they do last week, (2) what are they going to do this week, and (3) any issues they're having / things they're stuck on.
  • You will draft this document using Markdown and github. You will submit a link to this document directly in this assignment.
  • Your document will include a link to your Trello board and any commits that team members submitted in the previous week.
Please note that we are expecting all group members to commit meaningful code each week, which we will review in our weekly meetings.

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.