Project Deadlines and Deliverables
1.
The deliverables include a presentation of the project for approx. 30
minutes. Think of this as your opportunity to show off to the audience
what is exciting, non-trivial, and cool about your project. The
presentation should explain the general background needed to follow the
technical development, a short discussion of previous work to set the
stage for your work as needed, followed by a motivation for the work
performed. Why is the problem you worked on interesting? What is
challenging about it? This should be followed with a list of
contributions. Now you have set the stage for diving into the key
technical details such as algorithms, theorems, proof sketches, and the
like, followed by an experimental analysis as applicable. Not all talks
will follow this sequence exactly. For example, in some projects more
emphasis may be placed on experimental analysis while in others more on
analytical results. Some others may strike the middle ground. No matter
which template your project falls into, it'd be helpful to have an
"Organization" slide up front so it keeps the audience informed what to
expect and where we are in the talk. After the technical sections, you
may want to talk about any difficulties or issues faced. I'd like to
hear the limitations of your work just as much as I'd love to hear your
accomplishments. You should highlight any pieces of the project which
are unfinished, let's label them "work in progress". In addition, if
there are some far flung objectives that may be worth pursuing in the
future, you should discuss them under future work. There should be a
clear "Conclusions" segment to the talk. If you have any questions,
please feel free to ask me. The slides should be submitted by the time
your talk is scheduled.
2. In some project talks, a demo may be an integral component.
3. TENTATIVE: Your final project report will be due mid-late December.
The structure of the report can essentially follow that of your talk.
Some important differences to keep in mind. In your talk, you will only
have time to motivate your project and sketch out key ideas. The report
is the one that will have to close the loop by providing the details
necessary to complete the argument or description or proof or analysis
... . Depending on the material you have, it may happen that you don't
have time to present all aspects of your project in your talk. As a
hypothetical example, you have, in your project, developed algorithms
for detecting topi-wise influential bloggers in twitter. The work may
have sections corresponding to topic discovery, behavior analysis for
detecting influence, and say verification of patterns of influential
bloggers found from the analysis. You may not be able to cover all of
this in 30 min. The trick is to *advertise* ALL your contributions in
your talk, but say that you will focus on one or two of those. In the
report, however, you need to fill in the details for all sections.
In
terms of length of the report, writing style, and rigor, think of
"typical" top tier conference submissions, e.g., SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE,
PODS, AAAI, IJCAI, ICML, KDD, WSDM, ECML, ... Of course, they don't all
have the same length and the styles and rigor differ to some extent.
But you get the idea. I'd suggest 12 pages in a two-column
single-spaced format. For your convenience, you may use ACM SIG
Proceedings style, available from
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates (choose Option 1 OR Option 2).
Your
report will contain most standard sections (e.g., Introduction,
Motivation, Related Work, Background Notions (or Preliminaries),
Technical Sections, Conclusions and Future Work + Bibliography. Your
emphasis should be on discussing and critiquing prior art and
establishing the novelty as well as advantages of whatever
ideas/algorithms you propose or whatever results you establish. In
other words, you need to position your work properly in the context of
prior art. As mentioned above, work in progress is fine, but you should
clearly identify which parts of the work are settled and are therefore
solid, and which parts you are stuck in, or given more time you would
have solved, what ideas you have for solving those parts, etc. Use your
imagination and creativity for structuring this part.