CS 5/579, Winter 2020

Final Project

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:

  1. A proposal, consisting of:
    1. A short writeup motivating and describing the proposed project, specifically including:
      1. What specific data and resources you will need
      2. What your outcome(s) will be
      3. How you will know if it succeeded
      4. 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).
    2. A short (5 minutes), in-class presentation going over the material from the writeup
  2. 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:
    1. A short but complete writeup, including:
      1. At least some of your literature review and background material
      2. A summary of your methodology and results thus far
      3. A discussion of what you have yet to complete
    2. An in-class presentation (5-10 minutes) covering the same material
  3. 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.
  4. 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).