Princeton University Computer Science Dept.

Computer Science Independent Work More Details Randy Wang

Spring 2004

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:

• slides: administrative and general advices (.pdf, 48KB).
• slides: some project ideas by Prof. Randy Wang (.pdf, 282KB).
• "movie" of the above slide presentations (.avi, 36MB, 44min).
  (sound volume low, turn the volume way up or use a headphone)
• voice recording of the above slide presentations (.mp3, 4.8MB, 41min).
• voice recording of talks by Profs. Nicholas Pippenger, Moses Charikar, Vivek Pai, Andrew Appel (.mp3, 3.8MB, 32min).
• general advices by Prof. Brian Kernighan.

Independent Work Project Form

Each student must submit an independent work project form.  The form can be obtained from Tina McCoy in Room 410 of the CS building.  Please register online as well.

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

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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