Final Project
Due on Tuesday, May 15 at 11:59 PM
Overview
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.
The focus of the project can be anything of the student's choosing.
However, typical examples include: animations with passive or active
dynamics, interactive virtual environments, advanced photorealistic rendering
algorithms, etc. A good topic will provide an opportunity for each student
to implement something about the size of one course assignment and to demonstrate
some creativity in the design and demonstration of the system.
Of course, you are welcome to use code infrastructure provided in previous
assignments and to get ideas from searches of the web and the literature.
However, you should be very clear about which parts you did and what references
you consulted.
Written Proposals (due April 26):
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 ...
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Goal
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Previous Work
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What related work has been done?
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Approach
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What approach are we going to try?
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Why do we think it will work well?
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Methodology
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What steps (task list) are required?
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Which of these steps is particularly hard?
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What to do if the hard steps don't work out?
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Metrics
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How will we know when we are done?
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How will we know whether we have succeeded?
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Summary
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What will we learn by doing this project?
Project Proposal Presentations (in class on April 26):
Each team of students will give a 5-10 minute talk to present his/her course
project proposal to the class (with slides, videos,
and/or other props). You should be sure to convince us 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, and 5) you will know when
you are done. 5-10 minutes is a very short amount of time. So, please come
with a presentation that is concise and to-the-point. You probably
want to use around 6 slides following the outline above.
Final Written Reports (due May 15):
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
...
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Introduction
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Goal
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What did we try to do?
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Who would benefit?
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Previous Work
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What related work have other people done?
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When do previous approaches fail/succeed?
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Approach
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What approach did we try?
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Under what circumstances do we think it should work well?
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Why do we think it should work well under those circumstances?
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Methodology
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What pieces had to be implemented to execute my approach?
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For each piece ...
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Were there several possible implementations?
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If there were several possibilities, what were the advantages/disadvantages
of each?
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Which implementation(s) did we do? Why?
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What did we implement? <== Include detailed descriptions
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What didn't we implement? Why not?
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Results
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How did we measure success?
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What experiments did we execute?
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Provide quantitative results.
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What do my results indicate?
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Discussion
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Overall, is the approach we took promising?
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What different approach or variant of this approach is better?
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What follow-up work should be done next?
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What did we learn by doing this project?
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Conclusion
Demo Day (May 15 at 2PM in CS 105):
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 15-20 minutes what you have done and why it is interesting.
In addition to running a live demo on one of the computers, you should
describe the guts of your project, possibly using slides or other props.
Links to Other Resources