• View
• History
• Print

Main / Project

Some information about the first project...

There are six phases there's something due every week. Its important that you stay on top of it. Once you start to slip, its a slippery slope...

1. Week 0 - Pick a topic (talk to me about it) (due Monday 2/2)
2. Week 1 - Define a topic and read up on it (Reading Summary due Friday 2/6)
3. Week 2 - Define a project and plan things (Approved Project Proposal due Friday 2/13)
4. Week 3 - Signs of life / tools / background (Status report due Friday 2/20)
5. Week 4 - Implement and assess (Status report and revised proposal due Friday 2/27)
6. Week 5 - Implement and demonstrate (Demos due Friday 3/6)
7. Week 6 - Document, Evaluate and Tweak (Final stuff due 3/13)
8. Week 7 - Celebrate! (Spring Break 3/14-3/22)

Some ground rules...

1. What you do is up to you, but it must be approved by me.
2. You are encouraged to work with a partner. Or, to at least work on a similar project to someone else (its totally OK to do the same project, since everyone would do it differently).
3. You may work on any computers that you have access to. If there is some resource you might need, we should talk about it upfront.
4. You may use whatever tools you want (programming languages, ...) - don't expect much help with things that I don't know about.
5. You will have to turn in everything you do (all source code, etc)
6. Your project must involve some reading to understand the literature around the problem you are addressing. Even if you don't implement the state-of-the-art, you need to know about it.
7. Everything may be negotiable before hand. The later into the project, the less flexibility there will be.
8. You need to be able to give a demo to me. That means your program either needs to run on some computer in the department (I recommend the Starsky&Hutch labs since they have reasonable graphics cards), or a laptop, or a computer in an office in the building, or ...

Milestone 0 - Pick a Topic

Before Monday (Feb 2), you will need to pick a general topic and send me email. (Preferably with enough warning that I can think about it before class time). The idea is to work with you to come up with a set of readings and initial ideas for the next phases.

At this point, your topic won't necessarily be cast in stone. In particular, we might try to convince people to pick topics related to what other people are doing.

If you've done some reading already, or thinking about specifics, tell me about that as well.

You can either send this all to me by email, or put it on a wiki page. If you do the latter, send me email to make sure I look at the right place.

Milestone 1 - Define a Topic and Read up on it

For the week of Feb 2-Feb 6, your goal will be to learn enough about your topic that you can formulate a good project proposal. As part of Milestone 0, I will suggest some things to read, but you will need to find others (especially if you're an 838 student).

By Friday, Feb 6th, you will be required to turn in a summary of what you've read, as well as some initial ideas as to what you think a good project on this topic will be. This is important, since we will meet to discuss what you want to do.

During this week, your main task is reading and thinking. We will also have some "online discussions" where people who are reading about similar topics can combine their thoughts.

We will have less than normal amounts of lecture reading this week so you can focus on project reading.

Note: everyone must do Milestone 1 themselves, although it will involve discussions with other people with similar interests. Even if you don't work together on the project, you all should discuss project ideas.

Details on Milestone 1

Milestone 2 - Define your project and make a plan

By Friday, February 13th, you must have a project proposal and plan complete, written up, and approved. During this second week, your task is to define your project, refine the idea, make a plan for what you are going to do over the next few weeks, and convince me that this is a good plan.

The format of the project proposals will be provided later.

As part of this you will not only need to write up a project proposal, but also meet/discuss it with me and refine it until you get the OK. This means you can't just write it at the last minute.

It is important to get the proposal done/approved this week so that you can really get rolling on it.

If you want to do some initial experimentation during this week, that's OK. But this week is really about planning and preparing.

Some suggestions for planning:

• Think about how your plan fits into the timing of the various milestones. Can you really achieve what you want in the time allotted?
• Figure out a sequence of smaller steps. Ideally, you can have something where you get initial "signs of life" quickly, and then refine it.
• If there are "risks" involved (things you might not be able to figure out, open research questions, ...), do you have a fallback if things don't go as planned?
• If doing a survey is part of your project, you might be asked to present to the class, and that should be sheduled.

You should also use this week to assess implementation decisions. Are there libraries or tools you want to use? This is particularly important if we need to work to make sure they are available.

Once you get the proposal approved, you're on your way!

Details on Milestone 2

Milestone 3 - Initial Status Report

On Friday, February 20th, you will be required to submit a status report (format to be specified) describing what you've done with your project. This status report is critical since we need to make sure your project is on track to be successful. It is much better to be honest - if things aren't going as planned, we might need to make corrections to the plan.

Hopefully, during this third week, you'll have made all of the choices in terms of tools, and have some initial signs of life of things working.

It was suggested to me by another faculty member that when students are asked to make regular postings to blogs/wikis about their project status, they do better (there are many reasons to believe this). So, rather than asking you to write an explicit status report, I ask that you:

1. make a "Project1Blog" in your page group
2. post to it regularly - every time you work on the project, and maybe more often than that. document the steps that you take along the way, what works, what doesn't, ...
3. post to it every day (even if its to say "I didn't work on the project today since I spend so much time on it yesterday")
4. on Friday, 2/20, make a posting assessing your progress relative to where you expected to be in your original plan. and update the original plan - at a minimum, update the week 4 milestone, but you might want to update the rest of the plan as well. it would be nice if you marked the updates (for example in a different color), but if nothing else, the history mechanism will show it off

You should probably continue to add to your project reading blog as you read more.

Milestone 4 - Second Status Report and Updated Proposal

On Friday, February 27th, you will be required to submit another status report describing your progress to date. By this point, you should have a pretty clear idea of what you are going to actually accomplish by the end, so you will also be required to submit a revised proposal that gives an idea of what you really expect to get done for this project so we can begin to plan how to evaluate it.

Depending on how the project blogging experience goes in week 3, blogging your progress might take the place of explicit status reports.

Milestone 5 - Demonstrations

On Friday, March 6th, you will demonstrate your project. Basically, the main work should be done. The idea is that here is where we see what you've done, saving some extra time for doing evaluation and writing things up.

Milestone 6 - Final Writeups

Final writeups for the projects will be due on Friday, March 13th. Turn stuff in so you can take a Spring Break without worrying about this class project.