CS68 Final Project

Due by noon, Friday, December 19, 2014


Introduction

The final part of your course project consists of a presentation, a written report and a project demo. You should prepare a final report of at most 8 pages that describes your project. It should be similar in style and organization to the research papers that we read this semester. This is your opportunity to describe in detail what problem you were solving, how you solved it, how you tested your solution, what your results show, difficulties you encountered along the way, what you would have liked to have done (or done differently), and what you learned from your project. You will also submit all your project code and give me a demo of your project. However, your grade is almost exclusively determined by your written report and oral presentation. This models the real research world where the research paper is the primary, and usually only, mechanism through which your work is evaluated, and where written conference proceedings and conference presentations are the main mechanism through which others learn about your work. Therefore, you should spend a significant amount of effort making sure that you have a complete, and well-written final report and presentation; don't do a fabulous project and then fail to present it well.


Project Components/Grading

The major components of your project grade are:


Project Presentation

You will give a 15 minute presentation of your work including questions. You should prepare for about 12 minutes of content. See Prof. Newhall's Oral Presentation Guide for more information on how to structure your talk.

A few general comments:

Here are the rubrics for evaluating presentation:


Project Code Review/Demonstration

During The week of December 15th, you and your partner will give me a 15-30 minute demo of your project. I will have a sign-up sheet and will provide flexible times.

It is up to you to decide what you are going to demo. Before we meet, decide what you are going to show me. This is your chance to show off all your hard work; you want to convince me that you did something interesting and that you did a substantial amount of work.

I will use your demonstration as a starting point for my review of your final code submission.

Detailed Requirements for Project Written Report

You have been provided a sample report document in your lab directories. You must utilize the provided LaTeX style files to produce your report. I am more than happy to answer questions, but will almost always just "google" the question for you. Use Piazza and Stack Overflow for best results. You should have the following main sections in your paper:

  1. Abstract
    The abstract is a brief summary of your work. It should be written to make the reader want to read the rest of your paper; think of it as your "elevator speech". Briefly state the basic contents and conclusions of your paper: the problem you are solving, why the reader should care about this problem, your unique solution and/or implementation, and the main results and contributions of your work. Limit your abstract to just a couple of paragraphs - 200 words at most.

  2. Introduction
    The introduction is the big picture of your work: what, why, and how. It includes a definition of the problem you are solving, a high-level description of your solution including any novel techniques and results you provide, and a summary of the main results of your paper. In addition, motivates the problem you are solving (why should a reader find your work important), and describes your contribution to the area (this may not be applicable to your project).

    The first paragraph of the introduction should contain all of this information in a very high-level. Subsequent paragraphs should discuss in more detail the problem you are solving, your solution, and your results and conclusions.

  3. Related Work
    This is an essential part of a research paper; discussing related work is a good way to put your work in context with other similar work, and to provide a way for you to compare/contrast your work to other's work. If it makes sense to do so, you can incorporate related work into your Introduction. For example, if you are building on previous work. You can review a recent paper by my group as an example.

  4. One or more sections describing your Solution This is some times referred to as Methods, Algorithm, Methodology, or Approach. Your section headings could even be specific to the algorithm, such as k-Nearest Neighbors. As a whole, these sections should tell the reader what you did, and how they could replicate it. Be sure to address these issues:
    • Details of the problem you are solving
    • Details of your solution and the project's implementation
      Even though you may have spent a considerable amount of time writing code, this should not include a listing of any code you wrote. You can use high-level pseudocode to describe an algorithm if you implemented it.
    • Discussion of how your solution solves the problem.

  5. Experimental Results demonstrating/proving your solution
    • Experimental Methodology: Explain how you gathered the data and details of how your experiments were run. Did you use any external software? Did you pre-process the data in any way? How did you generate features from the data? Did you use cross-validation? Do you need to define any questions you use for evaluation (e.g., Silhouette Index).
    • Explain the tests you performed (and why)
    • Present your Results
      Choose quality over quantity; the reader will not be impressed with pages and pages of graphs and tables, instead s/he wants to be convinced that your results show something interesting and that your experiments support your conclusions. Your results should be rich in meaning and concise.
    • Discussion of your results.
      Explain/interpret your results (possibly compare your results to related work). Do not just present data and leave it up to the reader to infer what the data show and why they are interesting.

  6. Conclusions & Future Directions for your work Conclude with the main ideas and results of your work. Discuss ways in which your project could be extended...what's next? What are the interesting problems and questions that resulted from your work?

  7. A brief meta-discussion of your project Include two paragraphs in this section:
    1. Discussion of what you found to be the most difficult and least difficult parts of your project.
    2. In what ways did your implementation vary from your proposal and why?

  8. References
    At the end of your paper is a Reference section. You must cite each paper that you have referenced...your work is related to some prior work. You must cite all referenced papers within the text of your paper.

Writing Style Guidelines

  1. Write in a top-down style
    First present the high-level issues, then expand them. This applies to the overall organization of your paper as well as the organization of sub-sections and individual paragraphs.

  2. Conclude each paragraph, section and entire paper
    Each chunk of your paper whether it be a paragraph, a sub-section, a section, or the entire paper should have a conclusion. For example, each paragraph should be written as follow:
    • 1st sentence(s): main idea of paragraph
    • middle sentences: expansion of the idea (further explanation or elaboration of the topic)
    • concluding sentence(s)

    Each section of your paper should be organized as: high-level important points first, details second, summarize high-level points last.

  3. Use active 3rd person
    We present, we show, we demonstrate...

  4. Define terms, and always define them before using them

  5. Don't shy away from math - use equations and variables instead of overly verbose descriptions.

  6. Use figures
    Use diagrams to help explain system design, and graphs or tables for presenting results. If your project has a GUI component, then your paper should have some screen dumps of your interface (look at the man page for xwd).
    You should have a figure showing the high-level design of your implementation.


Submitting your lab
Your complete final project is due by noon on Friday, December 19. Subdirectories below are in your ~/cs68/labs/project directory. The first three items bellow will be submitted by using handin68. Data is submitted using submit68 instead. You should hand in: