Option (A): Class Project

The following is a more detailed description of the project timeline and requirements:

Now: Topic Selection

Start thinking about what kinds of projects interest you and with whom you might like to collaborate. I suggest taking a look at the course schedule and talking with other students about mutual areas of interest. You might also check out the suggested project ideas in the blackboard system (Left Menu, Course Documents=>Suggested Project Ideas). If you would like me to help you find a project that fits your interests, please let me know.

1/27 Tuesday: Option and Group Selection (9:00 PM) 

Please send the course staffs an email regarding which option you will choose. If you choose to work in teams, please include the names and email addresses of all the people in your group, as well as one or two sentences describing possible topics that you might be interested in pursuing.

2/3 Tuesday: Proposal Due (9:00 PM) 

Each group will submit a 2--3 page proposal describing the research project that you plan to work on. I expect to see sections on:
Please use the blackboard system (link on the course front page) to upload your project proposal. Each proposal should begin with a title and the names of the group participants. Each proposal should be single-spaced, with a single column and 12pt font, and have at least 1 inch margins. Submissions not in this format will not be reviewed. (This is to model program committees for conferences and workshops, which have the option to automatically reject papers if they do not comply with the submission guidelines).

2/26 Thursday: Project Checkpoint (9:00 PM) --- This project checkpoint review is not mandatory. This checkpoint is designed to provide early feedback for their midpoint review.

Upload a short progress report (max 2 pages) to the blackboard system. The progress report should explicitly address the milestones established in your original proposal, discuss which milestones you have met, and propose a new set of milestones if it appears that your original milestones are no longer appropriate. (As a side note: don't worry too much if your new milestones are different from your original milestones -- since these are research projects, it's totally natural for milestones to change and research directions to evolve. That said, I do expect to see progress since your original proposal.)

In your progress reports, you should reflect on what you have accomplished and draw preliminary conclusions from your results. If appropriate, you should also explicitly state any additional experiments or evaluations you may need to perform in order to strengthen your preliminary conclusions or answer open questions left by your preliminary conclusions.

3/13 Friday: Midpoint Review (9:00 PM)

Each group should submit a midpoint progress report (max 5 pages) to the blackboard system. This progress report should detail what you have accomplished so far since your last checkpoint. List all technical challenges if you are stuck in making progress.

In your progress reports, you should reflect on what you have accomplished and draw preliminary conclusions from your results. If appropriate, you should also explicitly state any additional experiments or evaluations you may need to perform in order to strengthen your preliminary conclusions or answer open questions left by your preliminary conclusions.
 
4/21 Tuesday: Draft Report (9:00 PM)

Each group should submit a draft of their written report. The formatting of the draft report should match that of a final report. (See below for what a final report should look like.) The draft should be uploaded to the blackboard system.
It's OK if you haven't completed your research by now. See the next bullet for why you're turning in a draft two weeks before the final report is due. Your draft should clearly specify what you plan to do over the next two weeks.

4/28 Tuesday: Peer Reviews Due (9:00 PM)

We will distribute your drafts to other students in the class, with the goal of simulating a mini program committee review process. This means you will also get comments from your peers. Consequently, you will all have the opportunity to read and review drafts from other groups. This process can be very educational unto itself, much akin to a miniature "program committee meeting."

You will be expected to read the draft reports that I give you (at most three) and write detailed reviews of those papers. You are to upload those reviews to the blackboard system by the above-specified deadline. The reviews you write should be anonymous (i.e., not include your name or other identifying information).

I will then collect those reviews and send them to the authors of the relevant reports. There are several reasons we're doing this, but the main goals are to (1) help you (as reviewers) gain more experience in evaluating in-progress (as opposed to completed) research and (2) help everyone improve the quality of their final written report.

5/3 Sunday: Final Report and Electronic Presentation Due (9 PM)
 
Each group will submit a written report (max 10 pages), as well as a slide deck, to the blackboard system. Please submit the report and the slide deck as separate PDF files. You may include an appendix beyond 10 pages, but your paper must be intelligible without it. Submissions not in the ACM format will not be reviewed (this is to model program committees for conferences and workshops, which have the option to automatically reject papers if they do not comply with the submission guidelines).

Your report should be structured like a conference paper, meaning that your report should contain an abstract, a well-motivated introduction, a discussion of related work (with citations), a description of your methodology, a discussion of your results, and so on.

Everyone should also submit a short summary of their contributions to the project (not required for groups of size 1). This should be at most a page long and can reference the final report.

5/4 - 5/6: Presentations (3:30 PM)

Each group will give a short presentation of their work during the final exam period. All group members should participate in the presentation. The length of the presentations will depend on the number of projects in the course, but I anticipate that each presentation will be 12 to 15 minutes long, and certainly no longer than 20 minutes.