CS 670DV Spring 2003
Project Deadlines and Guidelines
As mentioned earlier, 40% of your grade is based on the work you do for a
research project and the report you turn in. Essentially, you may think of
this as a paper that you submit to a conference. What will be evaluated is
your work/research, but the specific object evaluated is the report that you
write (supplemented if necessary, by discussions, demonstrations in class and
with me) and the presentation in class. It is therefore very important that
you master the art of technical writing. The uinversity has resources available explicitly for
this, and you are more than welcome to use them.
Final Report Format
The final report should be written using standard word-processing software
(LaTeX or LyX is strongly preferred but MS Word is acceptable)
like a regular research paper (about a dozen pages), and contain the following
standard sections:
- Abstract: a summary of the work and a few lines about
experimental results
- Introduction: problem definition, it's importance and impact,
and paper organization
- Main section(s): detailed description of your work, illustrative
examples showing your solution, and theoretical justification, experimental
validation (make sure that you describe this in enough detail that an
interested reader can duplicate the experiments) etc.
- Related Work
- Future Work and Open Problems
- Conclusions
Intermediate Reports
Two intermediate reports are intended to help you build your way towards the
final report.
- Preliminary Report: This five-page report will be the first
document you turn in. I want you to identify the problem, discuss why it's
important, and discuss the related work. Your discussion should
critically assess the state of the art: what has been done previously,
its limitations, etc. You should identify weaknesses and or open issues that
you intend to study. Your report should also develop a plan of attack to
address these issues, and propose a schedule for the work (discuss it with me
individually).
- Status Report: This (4-5 page) report should describe your
progress, the pitfalls that you encountered, the modifications that you
propose, and hence the updated plan of attack. Also describe the parts of the
plan that went smoothly and confirmed your original hypotheses.
For your final report you will directly use the first two (Intro and Related
Work). But remember, the related work evolves: as you work, you will
encounter new papers/literature on the topic, some new directions will force
you to look elsewhere, etc. Rule of thumb: if your final Related Work section
is identical to the report you submitted, then the project was
probably too predictable.
The plan of Action and the Status Report will help you do the actual work, but
parts can be incorporated into the final report and also help you develop its
outline.
Deadlines:
- First Report: March 18
- Status Report: April 15
- Final Report: May 13