CS6704: Guidelines for Course Project

Project Setting

You will work on a research project relevant to the research topics discussed in-class. You may work individually or collaborate with another student in the class.

You may choose a project from a list of sample project ideas or propose something else. If your current research project in-lab is closely relevant to the materials covered, perhaps you can think about reusing the project as your course project. If you propose your own research project, please discuss with me to get my approval first. If you have difficulty defining the project, please let me know.

Try to be aggressive when proposing research ideas. A challenging project with unknown outcome is more interesting than an easier project with expected outcome. However, be cautious that the project evaluation is still based on the achievement. If nothing is built or no new observation is made, you may earn less than 50% of the project score. If the project goes well, let's publish it.

There are several milestone checkpoints for the course project, including pre-prosal oral presentation, written project proposal, mid-point oral project presentation, and final oral presentation and report. Each milestone has its deadline and specific requirements.

The project should be maintained using Bitbucket or GitHub. I may later request to be added as your project member to facilitate code review.

Milestones

• Pre-proposal Oral Presentation Give a 5-min lightning talk to present:
  • Problem definition: why do you think it is interesting?
  • Proposed solution: how would you like to solve the problem?
• Proposal
  • 2-page project proposal conforming to the ICSE formatting guidelines (Word template, or Latex template),
  • abstract section briefly desribing problem definition and proposed solution,
  • introduction section describing the same thing with more details, and
  • related work describing relevant research already done by the community.
• Midpoint Oral Presentation Give a 15-min talk to present:
  • Short description of problem definition,
  • detailed explanation of solution design and its relationale,
  • implementation status, and
  • technical challenges already solved or should be solved.
• Final Oral Presentation Give a 15-min talk to present:
  • Short description of problem definition and solution design,
  • approaches of solving technical challenges,
  • experiment results, and
  • things you learn.
• Final Written Report A paper with at most 10 pages containing sections of Abstract, Introduction, Approach, Implementation, Evaluation, Related Work, Conclusion, and Reference.

Grading

• Pre-proposal oral presentation: 5%.
• Written proposal: 10%.
• Midpoint oral presentation: 10%.
• Final oral presentation: 10%
• Final report: 15%

Late policy