Introduction

Over this semester, we will cover a large range of material. You have an opportunity to choose one of the topics that you found most interesting and learn more about it yourself.

In most cases, you should find one partner who shares your interests. While some people may choose to form groups with three people, your project should be dramatically more ambitious to need such extra work. Please, no solo projects without instructor approval.

Some of you will be building systems and writing a lot of source code. Others will be examining existing systems, looking for bugs. Some of you may even choose to model a system and prove theorems about it.

Unless otherwise stated, deadlines are 11:59pm on the date listed below.

Milestones

The final project has a number of different milestones (due dates). Please try not to be late. After each milestone, I will try to give you useful feedback to help you along. The final project counts for a substantial fraction of your course grade. Because projects will range widely in their topics, it is impossible to describe a set grading algorithm. The feedback you get at each stage may include suggestions on how you can improve your work. These suggestions are also hints about how you can improve your grade.

Proposals
Your project proposals will probably be one to two pages long. Please make a web page for your project (we recommend blogs.rice.edu) and post a note on the course blog announcing your project idea and include the link. Everything you do should appear on your web page. If you’re unsure what you want to do, there are several ideas you might choose from, but you can certainly pursue your own ideas. If you believe your project is sensitive in some fashion, and thus shouldn’t be posted for all the world to see, blogs.rice.edu allows you to create non-public blogs. Just make sure that everybody in the class has read access (and verify that it’s not readable by the general public).

Status Reports / Status Milestone
As you continue your work, you should keep your web page up to date. I expect to see weekly updates to your page, describing your progress. For the November “status milestone” deadline, you should write a page or two of text that describes how far you’ve gotten. If you have interesting preliminary results, this is a good place to discuss them. If your results are “interesting” enough that they might general real-world publicity or cause real-world heartburn, then you may choose to password-protect your web site in whatever fashion you choose.

Presentations
Each project group will have between 15 and 25 minutes to make an in-class presentation summarizing their work (the exact time will depend on how many groups we have to fit into the available time). You should produce nice PowerPoint (or equivalent) slides and present a talk in the same fashion as you might do at a conference. You will also answer questions from the class. Also, please make sure you’ve got a PDF version of your presentation on your project’s web page.

Final writeup
This depends on the nature of your project. Generally speaking, you should write something in the fashion of a short conference paper. This would include an introduction, a brief discussion of related work, and your main contributions. You should also include a bibliography. While a real conference paper could be anywhere from 10-20 pages, your paper might be as short as 5 pages. Your work should be long enough to say what you need to say. (In the real world, page limits generally make it harder to write papers, since you’ve got so much more to say than you’ve got space to say it. You have the luxury of no limits. Live it up.) This writeup is your “final exam” and is due on the last day allowed by the university.

Grading
It’s impossible to have a uniform grading policy, given the huge diversity in how projects can be done. However, several things are important to point out. If you’re showing steady week-by-week progress, you’ll do better in the end. If the available evidence suggests that you spent a month doing nothing, your grade will suffer. Likewise, your class presentations and your final paper should be polished, both in terms of showing complete research results and good citations to related work, but also in terms of being written well. Good writing is a lot more than just being grammatically competent. You also need to have a coherent narrative to your work. Your introduction needs to motivate your work and justify the approaches you took. Your work needs to tell a story of you how solved a problem.