Course Project

The goal of this project is to give you a taste of what it is like to do research: first you will find and refine a project topic organized around a general problem to solve, this will require some examination of related work; second, you will come up with an initial solution to the problem and a plan for implementing your solution; third, you will implement your plan, possibly modifying it as need be; fourth, you will evaluate your solution though some type of verification or testing process; finally, you will convey the results of your work to others both in written form and through an oral presentation.

Project Proposal: due Feb. 18th by 5pm

Counts towards 15% of your final grade

The first two parts of the project will be met by a written project proposal. Your proposal should be no more than 5 pages long. It should clearly state the problem you are solving, how you are solving it, and explicitly list your plan for completing your proposed project. Specifically, your proposal should contain the following:

  1. Title and Authors
  2. An Introduction: 1-2 paragraph summary of the problem you are solving, why it is interesting, how you are solving it, and what conclusions you expect to draw from your work.
  3. Related Work: 1-2 paragraphs describing similar approaches to the one you propose. This need not be an exhaustive summary of related literature, but should be used to put your solution in context and/or to support your solution. This is also a good way to motivate your work.
  4. Your Solution: 3-4 paragraphs describing what you plan to do, how you plan to do it, how it solves the problem, and what types of conclusions you expect to draw from your work.
  5. Experiments: 1-3 paragraphs describing how you plan to evaluate your work. List the experiments you will perform. For each experiment, explain how you will perform it and what the results will show (explain why you are performing a particular test).
  6. Equipment Needed: 1 paragraph listing any software tools that you will need to implement and/or test your work. If you need to have software installed to implement your project, you should check with the systems lab to see if it is something that can be installed on the Sun lab machines.
  7. Schedule: list the specific steps that you will take to complete your project, include dates and milestones. This is particularly important to help keep you on track, and to ensure that if you run into difficulties completing your entire project, you have at least implemented steps along the way. Also, this is a great way to get specific feedback from me about what you plan to do and how you plan to do it.
  8. Conclusions: 1 paragraph summary of what you are doing, why, how, and what you hope to demonstrate through your work.

Getting Started

A good way to get started on your project is to take a look at related work; you want to have an understanding of what has been done, and how what you want to do fits into the field. This will also help you modify and more completely define your solution and determine how to test your solution.

Project groups should meet with me prior to turning in the project proposal to discuss the details of what you plan to do and how you plan to do it.