The final project for the course will be a research study on the subject of the student’s choice, which will make up a significant portion of the final grade. This can take the form of replicating a paper, attempting to implement a distributed algorithm of some kind, an experiment comparing several different approaches to solving a problem, or a more general research project (subject to instructor approval). The final deliverable will be an in-class presentation and a written scientific report, which must include a literature review. The final project will have several components:
A proposal, consisting of:
A short writeup motivating and describing the proposed project, specifically including:
What specific data and resources you will need
What your outcome(s) will be
How you will know if it succeeded
A contingency plan (what you will do if things go awry- note that this will require some thought about what sorts of things could go awry).
A short (5 minutes), in-class presentation going over the material from the writeup
A pilot study, to be completed mid-way through the term. The goal of the pilot study is to demonstrate initial feasibility: you’ve obtained whatever data set you need, demonstrated that you can work with it in the necessary way, gotten a baseline implementation of your algorithm completed, and measured its performance, etc. The pilot study’s deliverables are:
A short but complete writeup, including:
At least some of your literature review and background material
A summary of your methodology and results thus far
A discussion of what you have yet to complete
An in-class presentation (5-10 minutes) covering the same material
A final writeup, in the form of an ACL-style conference paper (8-12 pages, not including references, using the standard ACL LaTeX template), following the standard structure for a scientific paper. Note that you may (and should) use your pilot study writeup as the basis for the final writeup.
An in-class presentation (length TBD, depending on final course enrollment) of your entire project, including results.
This is a substantial project, hence why we have built in two checkpoints into the earlier parts of the term (the proposal and the pilot study).