The final project is a chance for students to build a system
incorporating one or more idea that has been learned in class.
Projects can be performed individually or in teams of two.
Written Proposals (due Thurs 12/6):
Each team of students should submit a one-page written project proposal.
The proposals should include enough detail to convince a reader that you've
found a good problem, you understand how hard it is, you've mapped out
a plan for how to attack it, and you have an idea about which experiments
you might run to test the success of your implementation.
Following is a brief outline you might follow ...
Goal
What are we going to do?
Previous Work
What related work has been done?
Approach
What approach are we going to try?
Why do we think it will work well?
Methodology
What steps (task list) are required?
Which of these steps is particularly hard?
What to do if the hard steps don't work out?
Metrics
How will we know when we are done?
How will we know whether we have succeeded?
Summary
What will we learn by doing this project?
Final Project Presentations (in class on Thurs Dec 6):
Each team of students will give a 5-10 minute talk to present
their course project (with slides, demos, videos, etc.).
You should be sure to convince the class that: 1) you are addressing an
important problem, 2) you understand various approaches
to the problem, 3) you have found an interesting approach to attack the
problem, 4) you have a SPECIFIC, DETAILED plan, 5) you have made some
progress developing that plan, and 6) you have a way to evaluate
your results. 5-10 minutes is a short amount of time. So, please come
with a presentation that is concise and to-the-point.
Demo Day (Monday Jan 21, 2-5PM, CS 302):
Each team of students will give a short presentation describing their
class project. Your goal should be to demonstrate and describe for
the class in 10-15 minutes what you have done and why it is interesting.
In addition to running a live demo on a computer, you should
describe the guts of your project, possibly using slides or other props.
Final Written Reports (due Mon Jan 21):
Each team of students should submit written final report.
The written report should contain descriptions of the goals and execution
of your project. You should include a review of related work.
You should write detailed descriptions of the approach you've chosen, the
implementation hurdles you've encountered, the features you've implemented,
and any results you've generated.
Following is a brief outline you might follow
...
Introduction
Goal
What did we try to do?
Who would benefit?
Previous Work
What related work have other people done?
When do previous approaches fail/succeed?
Approach
What approach did we try?
Under what circumstances do we think it should work well?
Why do we think it should work well under those circumstances?
Methodology
What pieces had to be implemented to execute my approach?
For each piece ...
What subproblem is being addressed?
Were there several possible approaches?
If there were several possibilities, what were the advantages/disadvantages of each?
Which approach(es) did we do? Why?
What did we implement? <== Include detailed descriptions
What didn't we implement? Why not?
Results
How did we measure success?
What experiments did we execute?
Provide quantitative results.
What do my results indicate?
Discussion
Overall, is the approach we took promising?
What different approach or variant of this approach is better?
What follow-up work should be done next?
What did we learn by doing this project?
Conclusion
Grading
Projects account for 30% of the final grade. Criteria include: