Project Information
One of the major components of this class is the project. The point
of this project is to delve further into some aspect that we have
been studying. You may do your project either alone or in groups of
two to three. The amount of work expected from the project is
commensurate with the number of people working on it (i.e., you
personally are expected to put in the same amount of work on a project
regardless of whether you're working alone or in a group). Keep in
mind that I do not require that this project be an
implementation. A literature survey is a perfectly fine project.
This project should not eat your life.
Schedule
- January 27: 1-page proposal due. This should include:
- What problem(s) you want to solve,
- What is going to be new and challenging about it,
- How you will try to solve the problem(s)
- What problems you don't consider to be part of the project (i.e.,
non-goals)
- What resources you need that you don't already have
- Who is on your team if you are working in a team. Teams are
strongly encouraged
- Week of February 2: feedback on proposal returned to you
- February 26: 4-page midterm status report due; this should
describe what you have done, what you have left to do, roadblocks
you've encountered, interesting or unexpected questions or issues that
uncovered, etc. Included in this report should be 1-2 pages of
literature search for related work; this should include both a written
component comparing your project to related work, as well as a
bibliography. Note that this checkpoint is largely a chance for
you to get the feedback that you need. While it is not graded,
students who have not made a good effort on this checkpoint often wind
up not making good effort on the project overall and thus not doing well.
- Week of March 2: feedback on status report returned to you
- March 31 - April 9: Project presentations. Precise schedule TBD
(it's first come first served via requests that are e-mailed to me ---
requests only accepted after proposals are turned in),
but everyone should be prepared for March 31. Your presentation
should be ~15 minutes long - with at least 3 minutes of that time
reserved for questions and answers. Here is what I expect out of the
presentation (not necessarily in this order):
- A good description of what the project is (inputs, outputs, etc.)
- The motivation for why this project is interesting - why did
you choose to do it, and why should we care about the problem
- A discussion of what makes this project non-trivial (especially
for the more research-oriented projects)
- A description of how the project fits into the context of the class
- A presentation of the results thus far
- A discussion of what results you expect to get by the project
deadline
- A discussion of the difficulties or surprises that you had when
working on the project
- If your project is in a group, everyone must speak.
- Tuesday, April 14 - 5:00pm:
Final report due. Your final project report is due, along with a
group evaluation for those working in groups (see below).
The final
report must be a full-length conference-style paper discussing your
project. (It should be roughly equivalent to 10-14 single column
pages. Note that this is a rough guideline. It is okay to go a
bit over this, particularly if you're working in a large group - this
is just meant to help you decide if you're in the right ball park.)
You should model your paper on some of the papers we've read this
term. Either PDF by e-mail or a hard copy in my box is fine. If you
give a hard copy, I'd appreciate an e-mail letting me know that you've
turned it in. Note that I don't care about the format; I only specify
the length in single column pages because otherwise people ask if I mean
single or double column pages.
The goal of saying "conference style paper" is that I want
you to include things like:
- Motivate the problem that you're working on
- Provide an example of a scenario where you'd use your solution
- Tell me about the solution that you've created, this includes telling me about what makes the problem interesting
and
hard. If you'd like, you can interpret this as telling me what
problems you ran into.
- Relate it to related work
- Tell me about potential future work - even if you have no
intension of ever doing it. Just like in a real conference paper, the
goal is for you to show that you know what some of the flaws are with
your system, even if you have no intension of solving them. ;)
Note that some of you won't actually create a solution, but just
explore the literature, which is fine. In this case, your job is to
explore the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches, and, if you
feel like there's an obvious choice, say what you would do if you were
going to implement a solution to the problem. Note that I do not care
about the layout.
In addition to the report, I want each person who is working
on a project in a group to SEPARATELY turn in a report on how they
felt that all of the group members (yourself included) contributed to
the project. Useful information is: what parts of the project you did
(e.g., if you divided the work by sections, who did what section), how
many hours you estimated that you worked, and how well you feel like
you and the other people in the project did.
Project Ideas
Here are some ideas that would be appropriate for the course project.
The best project ideas are likely to come from you; however, here are
some that you can use as is or use to think of new ones. The projects
can run the gamut from all theory to having a heavy implementation
component. I'll add more project ideas as I come up with them.
- Most database research topics that you would like to pursue. Keep
in mind that I do mean research topics; implementing a database
application does not qualify. Feel free to send me mail or come by to
talk about what qualifies as a good project.
- Helping users to create an ontology or schema is a well understood
process. Explore the best methodologies for doing so, especially
focusing on open source software.
- I'm beginning to work
with Siobhan
McElduff on 18th and 19th
century book catalogs. Right now the raw data has been scanned in, but
it's in no condition to actually be used. We need to do some
pre-processing using database cleaning and processing techniques. Some
things that would make good projects are:
- Entity reconciliation - how can we tell which book entries are referring to
the same books? This is especially problematic because same book
may both be many entities and one simultaneously in some ways. It will
usually be in multiple sizes, multiple bindings within sizes, and then in
multiple volume ranges (3, 4, 6, 2in 1). So a certain edition of
Shakespeare of a specific date and publisher could easily be in 20 or more
forms in the same catalogues. On top of that some of the items are
secondhand and that adds to the range of possible versions of the same
book.
- We'd like to have a hierarchy of the genres of the different types of
books. This will be difficult because the hierarchy is going to be different
across different catalogs and time. Additionally, the creator of the
catalogues was a marketing innovator, so he kept
experimenting with sections, so the same item might move from being in the
history category to the travel one or even classical authors. Then each
section title is repeated for each book size...and so forth. On top of that
he sold the shop and then each next owner put his own spin on things.
- Data cleaning - there will be many typos
- Trying to reconcile and do comparison of prices. This could be tricky both
because of keeping track of time issues and because of the old English
monetary system.
- A student of mine did his thesis on a system for providing a suite of tools
to help people be able to better manage their experience with multiple data
sources
(e.g., keep track of changes made to data downloaded from a database into an
excel spreadsheet). His thesis was to define the overall shape of the system. Pick one
of the components and implement it or otherwise improve the details of
it. (e-mail me if you want to see the thesis)
-
Some civil engineers are designing a web-based decision support system for sustainable
asset management that uses the knowledge hidden in both structured and
unstructured data to enhance decision making. Knowledge could be trapped in
emails, blogs, historical reports, scanned documents stored in computers or
external hard-drives, or in live data coming in from sensors and internet data
sources. The more useful information we can extract from the Big data coming
in, the more informed the decisions we make. Text Mining would be a useful tool
to mine the knowledge from text based documents and Statistical Analysis would
be a useful tool to mine the knowledge from structured data. Some possible
projects in this space:
- Design a web application that allows the User to interact with R
(statistical software) without the knowledge of programming in R. The user
should be able to perform basic statistical analysis on the data stored in a
database on the local machine or an online database, performs analysis, and
write the results back to another database and present the results in tables
and graphically.
- Design a web application that allows the User to connect to his/her
email account (e.g. gmail) and perform text mining on the data, and store the
result of such text mining analysis in a database online. Some text mining
analysis processes to consider: information retrieval; linguistic analysis;
pattern recognition; co-reference; relationship extraction; sentiment analysis;
quantitative text analysis; etc.
- Design a web application that allows the User to connect to a
computer and perform text mining on the data stored on that computer, and then
store the result of such text mining analysis in a database online. Some text
mining analysis processes to consider: information retrieval; linguistic
analysis; pattern recognition; co-reference; relationship extraction; sentiment
analysis; quantitative text analysis; etc.
-
The Global Legal Entity Identifier (GLEI for short) is a dataset collected
from various sources for the Global LEI watch project. "LEIs are designed
to be a single, universal standard identifier for any organisation or firm
involved in a financial transaction internationally". The dataset here
contains data on organisations/companies in different locations and their
corresponding identifiers. We are interested in integrating the GLEI data with
other sources. More details are here.
- Throughout this course, we'll talk about how the concepts
that we study relate to your data. Choose some part of your
data that is difficult to manage using current data management
techniques/software. Describe what would need to change in order for
your data to be managed effectively. Relate to readings both in class
and out of class.
A word on plagiarism
Your project, as with all of your work, is to be your work. If
you take ideas from anywhere else, you have to cite them, and
that if you take words from somewhere else, they have to be
quoted and cited (taking names of things is okay without quotes as
long as they are well cited, but if you're taking more than that, you
need to have it in quotes). Copying other people's text or figures
and claiming it as your own is not okay; it is plagiarizing.
What does this mean precisely? Let's say that this webpage is your
source [1]. If you were writing something about the first paragraph,
it might look something like the following:
504 includes a class project which can be done either individually or
in groups [1]. Overall, it shouldn't be too bad, in particular, "it
should not eat your life"[1].
Note that the first sentence is paraphrased, so it has just been
cited. The second sentence contains a direct quote, so it has been
put in quotation marks along with having a citation.
To make sure that you don't plagiarize, always add in citations where
appropriate as you are working on your paper. Never cut
and paste text and put it in your work without putting it quotations. Do not rely on the
fact that you will come back later and change wording later.
If you find yourself thinking "there's no point in my writing this
differently, the source that I'm looking at has written it better than
I could", I offer you the following words of wisdom (1) I don't care
if they wrote it better,
you can't plagiarize (2) in each case where I have detected
plagiarism, the plagiarized sections are the WORST part of the paper,
since they are generally just cut and pasted from other sources
without regard to the context that the project is supposed to be about.
So do us both a favour, save us both a lot of grief, and don't do it.
You'll learn more and turn in a better result.
Resources
If you are looking for relevant papers, here are some suggestions:
- DBLP
is a fantastic bibliography and link to papers for database and logic
programming.
- Google Scholar also has
a search engine that can be quite helpful since it indexes more than
just the metadata about the paper
For any source, you want to make sure that you're reading the best
papers. One way that will often, though not always, lead you in the
right direction, is to look at the highly rated venues. In data
management, some of those are:
Conferences:
- SIGMOD
- PODS (theory)
- VLDB
- EDBT
- ICDE
Journals
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Rachel Pottinger
E-mail Address: ![rap [at] cs [dot] ubc [dot] ca](/~rap/address.jpg)
Office Location: ICCS 345
Phone: (604)822-0436
Fax:(604)822-5485
Postal/Courier address:
The Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
201-2366 Main Mall
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z4
Canada