My expectation is that people will work in teams of two. See me if you want to do an individual project. It is possible that more than one team works on a related project topic. However, those teams must work separately on the project.
The project is worth 50% of the overall grade for graduate students. The breakdown of grading for the project is given below, with each part being assigned some portion of a total 50 points.
For each turnin, please submit a document that includes all of the previous milestones as sections at the beginning. This helps us keep track of who is doing what.
You need to first declare what your project will be about. You are asked to choose a project topic that relates (broadly) to topics covered in lecture. The purpose of your project is to explore this topic in more depth, so you will be expected to begin with the information provided in lecture and explore the topic in more detail, looking for more information on the historical background as well as the current state of the art in that topic.
Your deliverable for this phase of the project should be a short (1-3 paragraphs, a page at most) high-level description of your topic, emailed to the TA as a PDF or text document. Be sure to include a project title and the names of the people on your team.
The Instructor and TA will give feedback on the project topic to help define
it in a way that will be most profitable for the learning outcomes of
the class. There will not be any grading of this portion of the project.
One of the first important tasks in the project is to assemble a reading list of relevant literature. This literature is expected to come from major conferences and journal publications, and in some justified cases, authoritative Web sites. For this part of the project, you must provide a list of 10-20 references that will be the basis for your literature review. This list will be reviewed by the instructor and TA. Again, please submit as a PDF or text email to the TA.
The instructor will comment on the appropriateness of the reading list.
This reading list will count for 10 points in the project grade.
Your project team is to write a 2000-3000 word literature review that provides a summary of the historical background of your topic as well as outlines the current state of the art. It is important that you provide descriptions of the significant contributions of the work represented in your reading list. You should provide a bibliography and relevant citations within this review.
At the end of your literature review, you should provide a proposal for a development project that is motivated by your literature review; the proposal should be 1000-2000 words, and should build directly on the related work.
Your development project itself can take many forms. The goal of the development project is that you gain some experience either using a tool developed by some other company or researcher that you reviewed or developing some tool yourself that others might use. You have complete freedom in choosing the development environment for this project. The only requirement is that you be able to fully describe that development environment and provide some way for your project to be demonstrated to the instructor and TA at the end of the project.
This milestone will count for 15 points in the project grade.
Milestone 3 is the completion of your implementation task. Please provide a written overview of your development project. This should include a summary of the motivation and goals of the development task, a description of the work you performed, and a clear description of your development environment, including links to any toolkits that you used. Any source code that you develop should be provided as an attachment to your deliverable. Please submit all of these as a single file, in either PDF or text format, to the TA.
The implementation portion of the project will count for 15 points in the overall project grade.
During the last two class meetings, students will be responsible for a 15 minute presentation on their project. This presentation will include a demonstration of your work as well as an overview of its relation to existing work.
If you rely on special equipment that can't be transported to class, please bring a video and a short presentation; the instructor and TA may try to schedule time for a private demo as well.
The presentation will count for 10 points in the overall project grade.
Project ideas
Additionally, here are some thoughts about possible other project ideas that
you might find interesting, or that may serve as jumping off points.