COP5570 term group project information

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Important dates:

Project proposal: March 18
Project feedback: March 20
Project finalized proposal: March 25
Progress report: April 1 , April 15
Project presentation/demo: April 22-April 24
Project report/software submission: April 24
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Group Size: 1 - 2 (3 with special permission from the instructor)

Project objective: To apply the techniques learned in COP5570 to some
research and/or practical applications.

A project may be a research project or a development project or a combination
of both. The relative weight for research and development components will be
determined based on the nature of the project. Projects with no significant
research components should have significant development components. Projects
with research components must also have some development components. 

Grading: Grading will be based on six elements: project proposal
progress reports, project presentation and demo
(final week of the class), project report/software.

Participation: 20% (proposal, progress reports, report, demo)
Research and development: 80% (presentation + demo + software + report)

Research components:
   1) The significance of the application or problem. (presentation + report)
   2) The survey of the state of the art. (presentation + report)
   3) The novelty of the proposed techniques (presentation + report)
   4) The completeness of the implementation and evaluation
      (presentation + report)

Development components:
   1) Software usefulness and correctness (demo + software)
   2) Software scope (demo + software)
   3) The challenges/novelty of software implementation techniques
      (demo + software + presentation + report).
   4) the completeness of the evaluation (presentation+report)

progress reports: graded by the instructor

Project presentation/demo: graded by classmates based on
   - clarity
   - organization/presentation
   - novelty
   - evaluation
   - overall quality of the project

report/software: graded by the instructor/TA
   - clarity
   - organization
   - novelty
   - evaluation
   - writing quality
   - overall quality of the project

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Examples of potential projects:

1. A full scale threaded/parallel implementation of a
   UNIX utility (e.g. concurrent make, find, grep, etc).
   (Development)

2. Design, implement, and evaluate a threaded/MPI/distributed
   significant algorithm (e.g. ML algorithm, graph algorithm, matrix
   algorithm).
   (development/research)

3. Develop, implement, and evaluate a novel communication
   algorithm (e.g. intro-node broadcast) (development/research)

4. Peer-to-peer on-line gaming (development)

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Initial project proposal - about half a page including the following
information

  - Project title
  - Project group members
  - Brief project description
    * what will you be doing?
    * why is the project important, interesting, etc?
    * how is it related to COP5570?
    * Estimated lines of code in the project.

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Final project proposal - same format as the initial proposal

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Project progress reports - add about half a page
to the project proposal
  - General description of project progress
  - What were done by each group member during the period

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Final submission includes both project software and project report
The project report is typically 5 to 10 pages in ACM conference
format and will be graded as a professional publication (reading
ACM conference or jounral papers to see examples).