Project Guidelines
This course requires a project to be performed by one or two students, requiring about 40 hours effort per person over the entire semester. A project includes the following phases: choosing a project topic, writing a project plan, conducting the project, writing a mid-term and final project report, and presenting the project in class.
Project Content:
A project
usually consists of reading of papers in a chosen area, compare performances of
different approaches, and perhaps propose your own algorithms/improvements,
implement one or two of them.
Project plan (2-3 pages):
The project plan should
include the following:
1. Project title and team members
2. An abstract: in one paragraph or two,
describe briefly the project scope and what you hope to accomplish.
3. Project schedule: It should include a list of subtasks that you plan to accomplish; for each subtask, describe who in your team is primarily responsible for it and the deadline for completing it. You should allocate time for searching the project subject, initial literature search, preparing the midterm report, final report, and final presentation, in addition to the reading/simulation work you plan to do.
4. List of references: this includes papers and documents and possibly web links that you have found that are relevant to your project topic. Please include complete citation of each item: author, title of the article, journal or book name, and if appropriate the URL. You should follow the standard citation format of IEEE journals.
You can
discuss with me in the beginning of the semester about the possible topics, either in
my office hour or through email.
Project Midterm Report (5-10 pages):
You should think of the mid-term project report as an on-going document that starts from your project plan and will evolve into the final report. Please include the following in your midterm report. Items 1,2,5,6 are from the project plan, which you may revise based on your progress so far.
1. Project title and team members
2. An abstract
3. Divide your report into multiple sections. Section 1 should be an introduction or overview. Then each subtask can be a subsection. For each subtask, describe what you have accomplished so far, and what remains to be done.
4. Revised Project Schedule: you may want
to revise the original plan based on your progress so far. You may need to
modify the deadlines only, or you may even need to modify the sub-tasks. The
later may be true if after your study so far, you want to redirect your project
in terms of the technical content.
5. List of references: you may add new references and delete irrelevant ones that originally appeared in the project plan.
Final project report (10-15 pages)
The final report is an extension of your midterm report and should include the following. You may need to modify those items that were included in the midterm report.
1. Project title and team members
2. An abstract
3. Overview of the project and schedule
(describe the subtasks and actual completion schedule. Specify who is
responsible for which subtask if you have multiple members on the team.)
4. Project accomplishment: This can be
divided into multiple sections, each section describing one subtask that you
have worked on. For each subtask, describing what you have done, what you have
learnt. If your project includes the comparison of different
systems/techniques, you may have separate sections describing each
system/technique and another section comparing these systems/techniques and
summarizes the pros and cons of each. You may have another section describing
your proposed solution on how to modify each or combine them.
5. Summary: This section should briefly summarize
your findings. It should also include a discussion of future works that you
think should be studied.
6. List of references: update from your
midterm report as appropriate.
Final project presentation:
A 10-15
minutes oral presentation, possibly with demonstration of computer
implementations. Time
allocation depends on the number of projects to be presented and the number of
team members.
You should prepare a presentation file
using a computer software (e.g. powerpoint).
1.
You
will be giving the presentation using your laptop and a video projector. (If
you don’t have a laptop, please send the presentation file to the
instructor in advance in email)
2.
If
you want to include any demonstration in your presentation, please make sure it
can be presented directly from your computer. If you want to give the
demonstration in a particular lab, please contact the instructor before hand.
3.
The
suggested outline for your presentation:
a.
Project
title and team members
b.
Overview
of your project: the overall goal and subtasks, and who is responsible for
what. (The finalized schedule)
c.
Describe
each subtask: what you did and what you learnt/designed.
d.
Demos
if appropriate
e.
Summary
If you have more than one person
on the project team, please prepare the presentation in such a way so that each
person on your team can present different parts of it.
Last updated: 1/21/2009, Yao Wang