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

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.

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.

I note that using ChatGPT or a similar system on any work that you turn in also constitutes plagiarism.

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: 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:

Journals


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Rachel Pottinger
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