Project (35%)

Over the course of the quarter, you will be working independently on a course project.

The project can be:

  • Research project—A research project that is connected to topics covered in this course. It is encouraged for it be to connected to your PhD/MS research or other course projects. But the connection to the course must be evident and the contributions distinct.
  • Literature survey—A deep dive into several papers on a chosen topic area, including your inclusion criteria, motivating questions, and insights.

The grading for the project is as follows.

  • Project proposal due week 5 (5%)
  • Project presentation in week 10 (10%)
  • Project presentation peer review in week 10 (5%)
  • Project report due finals week (15%)

No late days allowed.

Proposal

You may work on the project individually or in pairs. For pair projects, the expectation is that the project should be larger in scope compared to an individual project. That is, there needs to be justification for why 2 people are needed for the project and why it does not make sense for a single individual to carry out this project alone.

The purpose of the project is for you to dive deeper into any of the topics covered in the course. Depending on your background and prior experience, projects can range from re-implementing an algorithm from a paper (and tweaking it), applying techniques learned in this class to a novel application, or pursuing a novel research direction. If you are currently involved in research activities, your project can be (and is encouraged to be) connected with your existing research. It is ok to recycle any material from your homework or demos from the course for your project.

Your proposal should be about 1 page. In your proposal document, you should include the following elements:

  • Relevance: What is the relevance/importance of the problem you seek to solve? What motivates you to study this topic?
  • Issue: What is the problem you seek to address? What are the questions you want to answer?
  • Solution: What are you proposing to do in order to answer the address the problem you have posed?
  • Project plan: Layout the steps you plan to take to carry out the work and plans to evaluate it. Think about what are things you need to succeed (e.g., data? simulator? tools?) and whether you need to build them from scratch or utilizing existing resources.
  • Timeline: Provide a timeline outlining the tasks you plan to take
  • Outcomes: What do you hope to gain from this project? For example, do you aim to gain deeper insights into algorithm X, or do you hope to develop a new method that outperforms method Y, or do you hope to get a deeper understanding of method Z?
  • Connection to your course: Explain how your project connects to the concepts covered in this course.
  • If working in pairs, explain how the proposed activities will be divided and your collaboration plan and why two people is necessary.
  • If this project is part of a project from another course, explain how the scope of this project does not significantly overlap with the other course.

Presentation

Presentations are scheduled for the last week of the quarter (before finals week) on Dec 2nd and Dec 4th during regular class time. Select your presentation time slot on the sign up sheet.

To make the transition between speaker smoother, we will be presenting off the same laptop. Please upload your slides to this folder, including any video you may need access to. Please use an easily identifiable file name.

During the presentation sessions, in addition to giving a presentation, you are also expected to perform (at least) the following:

  • 3 peer evaluations per session (at least 6 in total) (Link to form)
  • 1 question per session (at least 2 questions in total)

Report

Due date: Wednesday Dec 11th, 11:59PM. Upload to Canvas

As part of your grade, you are to submit a conference-style paper that describes your project. A latex template. Following typical conference guidelines, the page limit is 8 pages, including references, but it is not necessarily expected you will need all 8 pages.

If you use genAI software (e.g., ChatGPT) in your project report and results, you must include a section at the end of your report acknowledging this, and describe the way(s) it was used. Ultimately, the report must be written by you, and any blatant use of genAI software to you write your report will be considered a form of academic dishonesty and a violation of the Student Code of Conduct.