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Computer Science
Independent Work
More Details
Moses Charikar
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Spring 2006
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Get Started Meeting
We will discuss the schedule for independent work projects this
semester.
You will be advised about how to find an advisor, how to do independent
work, how to prepare an oral presentation, how to write the final
report,
etc. Of course, this meeting is a great time to ask questions.
Some of the materials from this meeting are available online:
Independent Work Project Form
Each student must submit an independent work project form. The
form can be obtained from Donna O'Leary in Room 410 of the CS
building.
Project Proposal
The amount of time alloted to each talk will be strictly enforced.
Please come with a concise presentation. You slides should address the
following:
- Problem description
- What am I going to do?
- Why is it important?
- Why is it hard?
- Approach
- Previous approaches
- My approach
- Why is mine better
- Methodology, milestones, and deliverables
- Specific steps
- Steps completed by checkpoint
- Deliverables by checkpoint
- Remaining steps before end of semester
- Deliverables by end of semester
- What might be hard and fall-back plan
- Summary
Again, your slides should address all of these issues.
But to limite the length of the presentation, you may skip some of
these bullets in your talk.
You need to upload
your presentation by the deadline of the proposal.
You don't need to bring a laptop---I will bring a laptop and we'll
access your slides that you have uploaded over the network.
Project Checkpoint
Submit 4-5 powerpoint slides summarizing your progress. (I only need
the slides---you don't need to give a talk.)
You slides should address the
following:
- Remind me what you have proposed to have done by the checkpoint.
- Report what you have actually accomplished by the checkpoint in
terms of steps/deliverables.
- Give preliminary results.
- Report difficulties, surprises, and/or deviations from the
proposal.
- Describe what more you plan to accomplish by the end of the
semester in terms of steps/deliverables.
You need to upload
your slides.
Project Presentations
- Review the problem description.
- Review your approach.
- Give details of your work (for examples, in terms of design
and/or
implementation).
- Give key results (measurements, experimental results, etc.).
- Conclusions.
You need to upload
your slides.
Project Reports
The final written report should contain descriptions of the goals,
challenges,
implementation, results, and conclusions of your project. You
should
include a review of previous work with appropriate citations from the
literature.
You should write detailed descriptions of the approach you've chosen,
the
implementation hurdles you've encountered, the features you've
implemented,
and the results you've generated. Please do not be vague in your
written descriptions. Final reports from previous semesters are
available
in the cabinets outside of room CS410. Following is a suggested
sample outline ...
- Abstract
- Introduction
- What problem are you trying to solve?
- What are the potential applications for a solution to the
problem?
- Why is the problem challenging?
- Briefly motivate/describe your key insight/contribution (one
paragraph)
- Give a brief overview of your paper (a one paragraph executive
summary)
- Previous Work
- What researcher first identified and worked on your problem?
- What other researchers have worked on it? What approaches
did
they
try?
- For each previous approach: what was the key insight? Under
what
conditions
does it fail/succeed?
- What is the gap you are trying to fill?
- Approach
- What approach did I try?
- What is the key insight that differentiates it from previous
work?
- Under what circumstances do I think it should work well?
- Why do I think it should work well under those circumstances?
- Methodology
- What pieces had to be implemented to execute my approach?
- For each piece ...
- Were there several possible implementations?
- If there were several possibilities, what were the
advantages/disadvantages
of each?
- Which implementation(s) did I do? Why?
- What did I implement? <== Include detailed
descriptions
- What didn't I implement? Why not?
- Results
- What was I trying to test?
- What experiments did I execute?
- What different approaches/parameters did I vary in these
experiments?
- What objective measure of success did I use?
- Provide quantitative results.
- What do my results indicate?
- Discussion
- Overall, is the approach I took promising?
- What different approach or variant of this approach is better?
- What follow-up work should be done next?
- What did I learn by doing this project?
- Conclusion
- Summarize
- Draw conclusions
- References
- Follow the guidelines in:
- James Thorpe, Literary Scholarship, Chapter III,
Boston
Houghton
Mifflin, 1964, pages 63-88.
- The MLA Handbook, 2nd Edition, Modern Language
Association of America,
New York, 1984.
- A Manual of Style, 13th Edition, University of
Chicago
Press, Chicago,
1982.
You need to upload
your final report.
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Independent Projects