Instructions for Mini-project Sponsors

Purpose

The purpose of these mini-projects is to provide the incoming PhD students with some initial research experience. For this reason, the faculty and the senior PhD students from all research areas are requested to submit mini-projects. Students are required to choose three mini-projects from the list of projects. Students are required to choose projects from different areas.

Duration

The time allocated for each mini-project is three weeks, and each project should require approximately 30 to 40 hours of work. The sponsors are requested to be considerate of this time allocation in designing their mini-projects. These projects should be the initial work that you would require students to undertake before they work on an 8903 or a GRA. Please avoid completely open-ended problems and define the scope of your project. The project description should encourage the students to come and meet with you to discuss the scope and define exactly what they can accomplish in the limited time frame. Senior PhD students can also sponsor projects, ideally with their advisors. Examples of possible projects can be found by looking at last year's projects

Project Schedule

The schedule for the projects is as follows:
Date
Milestone
September 3, 2002 Identify Project #1
September 24, 2002 Project #1 Due
October 1, 2002 Identify Project #2
October 22, 2002 Project #2 Due
October 29, 2002 Identify Project #3
November 26, 2002 Project #3 Due

Evaluation

Please specify what you are looking for in terms of evaluation. You will need to provide me with feedback on the completed project so that I can assign final grades. Each project is worth 25% of the overall grade.

Submitting Projects:

We request (but do not require) that all the projects be submitted in the HTML format. Use http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2001/cs7001_fall/projects/essa02.html as a template and you can place it on your own WWW page. Please let Zack Kurmas <kurmasz@cc.gatech.edu> know how to access your mini-project web pages or send him the file so he can place it appropriately.

Last year's projects

Several of you have already suggested that you'd like to use last year's mini-projects. That may be fine, however, please review them, update them as neccessary, and let Zack know which projects you wish to use again this year. The older projects are available from http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2002/cs7001_fall/Projects.html.

Please submit these projects to Zack Kurmas<kurmasz@cc.gatech.edu> as soon as possible.