Overview
The semester-long project in COS518 is an systems-building project. Projects should be done in groups (either of size two or three, to be determined by the instructor after the course size finalized) and must involve significant system programming. All group students are expected to share equally in the implementation.
There is a significant departure this year in the scope of the project compared to previous versions of COS518. In particular, we expect most students to satisfy the group project by reimplementing and reproducing the results from a paper we read during the semester or on a like topic.
As in previous years, students are also able to satisfy the project by performing novel research projects, but such projects must be closely related to the material and topics taught in the COS518 curricula. The instructors will take a narrow view as to what projects satisfy this criteria (e.g., your ongoing research on self-driving cars or software-defined networks will likely not be approved).
Students uncertain as to the satisfiability of their project are urged to speak to instructors as soon as possible, as the initial timeline for project selection is aggressive.
Timeline
- Team selection (2/10)
- Project proposal (2/24)
- Project selection (3/3): Project topic/proposal finalized
- Interim project presentation (3/13)
- Project presentation (near Dean’s Date)
- Final report (Dean’s Date of 5/16)
Assignments
Project Proposal
There are two types of projects in this class: reproducing others’ research results, and novel research. Proposals should be submitted via a private note to Instructors on Piazza.
Project Proposal: Reproducing Research
For reproducing research projects, students should write a note to the instructors with a few paragraphs that include the following information. Please tag these proposals as #proposal #reproduction.
- Background
- Name of paper
- Brief summary of paper’s problem domain / challenge, goals, and technical approach
- Summary of paper’s current implementation, evaluation strategy, and key results
- Plan:
- Proposed implementation (language, framework, etc.)
- Evaluation strategy (testing platform/setup, simulated data/traces, etc.)
- Key results trying to reproduce
- Discussion of how you can compare your findings (quantitatively, qualitatively) with previously published results
- New questions/settings trying to evaluate that are not addressed in the original paper
As the final plan mentions, it is important when reading a paper to ask what questions and/or settings are not included in an evaluation. For example, what happens if a workload shifts from being uniformly distributed to Zipfian? What if failures occur in a different fashion than evaluated? What if the data in a big data processing system has a different structure than evaluated (e.g., the “graph” that the data represents has a different edge distribution)? And so forth…
Project Proposal: Novel Research
For novel research projects, students should write a note to the instructors with a few paragraphs that include the following information. Please tag these proposals as #proposal #novel.
- Background
- What problem is research attempting to solve?
- Why is the problem important?
- How does this relate directly to topics or papers covered in class
- Novelty
- What is the current state-of-the-art in related work, and why are they insufficient?
- What is your (novel) technical insight/approach to solving this problem
- Plan
- Proposed implementation (language, framework, etc.)
- Key questions that evaluation will address
- Evaluation strategy (testing platform/setup, simulated data/traces, etc.)
- What does “success” look like? How do you quantify/compare results to alternative approaches / related work?
If students are concerned that their proposal project might not be sufficiently relevant to COS 518 to satisfy the topical criteria, please contact instructors earlier than later. Proposals not closely related to the topical matter may be rejected outright as not appropriate.
Project selection
The project proposal from above will be finalized. This may involve one or more back-and-forth between instructors and group (likely via Piazza).
Presentation
More information forthcoming.
Final report
Rather than a research paper written as a Latex document, your final report will be a blog post that expands on a similar organization and topics as addressed in your initial project proposal.
For reproduction projects, the post should have a particular focus and discussion on the evaluation (setup, comparative results, discussion of differences, and so forth).
Your final report must be published on a public forum like Medium as part of a course page, to be determined soon by the instructors. Source code and data should also be made available.