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. There are many varieties of programming projects:

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.

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, and more will be added over the course of the lectures.

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 with me the week of October 19 at the absolute latest, and earlier would be better. 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.

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 30 by 5pm. Your proposal should be in the form of either HTML or PDF. Send me the URL for the page to hand in the proposal. Your email must have the following subject header:

Subject: 533 submit proposal

Updates

The class sessions on November 16/18 will be used for project update presentations. You should aim for 10 9 minutes each. Get your slides to me by 10am. if you're using my laptop, and right after class if you're using your own All slides must be sent to me in advance - too much technical chaos to try switching between laptops for 8 people in a session. PDF preferred, PPT allowed. Exception: if you want to give a demo on your machine, you can try, but have backup slides in your presentation in case it doesn't work immediately. Or a backup video.

Do not assume your classmates have read your proposal. 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: 10 minutes present, + 2 minutes for questions
Final report format: PDF

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 also due at that time. 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 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 for calibration.
Back to 533 Home
Tamara Munzner
Last modified: Wed Nov 4 16:13:44 PST 2009