Project Description


Overview | Software | Proposals | Updates | Final Presentations/Reports | Projects from Other Courses | Back to 533 Home

Overview

There are three kinds of projects: programming, analysis, and survey. You may do the projects individually or in teams of two. The total amount of work done must be commensurate with the size of the group.

Programming: For a programming project, you will implement a visualization system of your own. You may use existing components as the base for your system. Note that research novelty is not a requirement for a course project. The three common varieties of programming projects are:

Analysis: For an analysis project, you will pick an application domain to address, and write a combination survey/analysis paper about it. No serious programming is required, so this option is suitable for non-CS students. You will include a detailed survey of previous work in the area. This survey should be more considerably detailed than the required previous work section in the programming project writeup. You will pick one or more existing software tools to to analyze a dataset from that domain, so no serious programming is required. (You may need to write some scripts to change data formats, however.) The analysis should analyze the strengths and weaknesses of those tools, and discuss in detail whether they are effective for the task that you have chosen.

Survey: For a survey paper project, you will need to read many papers in a particular domain and write up a detailed survey. Talk to me for more details. Again, the writeup will be much longer than for a programming project, and this option is particularly suitable for non-CS students.

Software

The language and platform for your project is your choice. You will submit your code along with to your final report, but I do not necessarily expect it to compile on my own machine.

In lecture, I will briefly discuss some of the software packages and toolkits that you might use to build your final project. A detailed (but not necessarily complete) list of these packages is on the Software Resources page.

Proposals

You must meet with me in person to discuss your project at least once before submitting a proposal. It may take more than one meeting for me to sign off that you're ready to move on to the writeup stage.

You're submitting a proposal, not a specification - it's natural that your plans will change somewhat as you refine your ideas. But your proposal should be based on an idea that we've discussed and I've approved. When you come talk to me about your proposal, I'll give you some pointers to background reading in the area of your interest. You need to meet me between Oct 10 and Oct 19 at the latest, and earlier would be better. I will be out of town Oct 20-28. While I can sign off on some projects after only a single meeting, some people have needed two or three meetings to find an appropriate project that gets approved.

I advise that you start by thinking about what you want your software to do, and only then think about how you would implement it (languages, platforms, etc). The key is to find some domain and task that both interests you and presents an opportunity for infovis. That is, there is some task where a human needs to understand the structure of a large dataset. You're definitely welcome to link the infovis project to another class or research project. You may also build on existing software, but your project should include some implementation work of your own if it is a programming project.

I do not advise that you start by deciding on a language, and then look around for some task that you might be able to do in that language - that's backwards, and is likely to stifle your creativity.

Proposal format: your writeup should be at least two pages and include:

One proposal per project (whether it is individual or team) is due on October 28 by 5pm, as PDF by email with the subject header

533 submit proposal

Updates

The class sessions on November 14/16/21 will be used for project update presentations. You should aim for 18 minutes each. You must have slides, PDF or PPT or Keynote allowed. If you want to use video, contact me the day before so that we can test codecs. If you're using my laptop, email your slides to me by 11am, with the subject header
533 submit update
If you want to give a demo on your machine, you can try, but have backup slides in your slide deck in case it doesn't work immediately. Or a backup video. If you're using your own laptop, email slides to me by 6pm (an hour after class).

Do not assume your classmates have read your proposal. I have; they probably haven't. You should prepare a short presentation where you summarize what you're doing: the problem and proposed solution for design study projects, the technique ideas for technique exploration projects, the scope and preliminary taxonomy for survey projects. Make sure you leave enough time to explicitly discuss the progress you've made so far.

Final Presentations/Reports

Final presentation length: 15 minutes total. 12 minutes present, + 3 minutes for questions
Final report format: PDF
Code format: tar/gzip/zip package

You will present the results of your project with both a presentation and a written report. The presentation will occur during the final exam slot for this course, and the report is a day and a half later. The reports should be at least 8-10 pages of text (programming) or 15-20 pages (analysis), and should include screen snapshots of your running software. There is no length restriction, feel free to use as much space as you need for images. Showing live demos of your software in action is encouraged in the final presentation. If you are giving a demo, be sure to practice in advance so that you don't run over your time slot! Also remember that the audience has seen your project update, so you don't need to repeat all of that. Focus more on your results.

In contrast, your final report should be a standalone document that fully describes your project. Do not assume the reader has seen your original proposal. It should have both the structure and form of a conference paper, using the InfoVis templates. Your paper should include the following information:

A good article on technical writing is The Science of Scientific Writing Gopen and Swan, American Scientist (Nov-Dec 1990), Volume 78, 550-558. Also, see my Writing Correctness and Style Pet Peeves list!

Your code should be packed up as well. You must include a README file at the root giving a brief roadmap/overview of the organization of what you're handing in: which parts are your code, which parts are libraries, and so on. It should also state how to compile and run the program. I do not necessarily expect that your software compiles on my machine if you developed for a different platform, but I want to see what you've done.

A few examples of particularly strong projects/papers from previous courses:

Here's the complete set of projects from previous years, to help you judge scope and consider possibilities:

Projects From Other Courses

There are several previous infovis courses that have project components, browsing through the final reports may help you think about what you might like to do, and what scope is realistic for a course project. Note that the scope of the projects may be different at other universities, so see in particular the ones in the previous versions of this course, listed above, for calibration.
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Tamara Munzner
Last modified: Wed Nov 30 22:21:27 PST 2011