Graduate Student Project

Graduate Student Project #

This assessment only applies to graduate students enrolled in CS646.

You will perform an individual graduate project. Three types of graduate projects are possible:

  • Literature Survey: The goal of this kind of project is to gain a more complete understanding of a topic relevant to this course. The outcome of this project will be a critical summary of the state-of-the-art on your selected topic; this summary should be 6-8 pages. It is essential that this summary synthesizes the surveyed literature to identify important themes, findings, and open questions.

  • Build a Software Tool: The goal of this style of project is to identify some problem developers encounter in practice, find some solution, and validate that the solution helps with the initial problem. I would recommend drawing upon your experience as you write code to identify some problem that has inhibited you in the past and fix it. The outcome of this project will be a short (4-6 pages) paper describing the problem, your solution, a comparison to related approaches, and some form of validation.

  • Use an Advanced Software Development Tool: The goal of this project is to provide a validation of some previously-existing development tool from the research community. The tool you validate must be related to the course material. The outcome of this project will be a 4-6 page paper describing your experience with the tool outlining its strengths, weaknesses, and avenues for future improvement.

Deliverables #

1. Project Proposal (20%) #

Before you undertake your project you will need to submit a proposal for approval. The proposal should be short (1-2 pages in ACM format). The proposal should include a problem statement, the motivation for the project, a set of objectives you aim to accomplish, and a set of milestones.

2. Project Report (80%) #

The outcome of the graduate project is a written pdf report in ACM format. The required length is (excluding references and appendices):

  • Literature Survey: 6-8 pages
  • Build a Software Tool: 4-6 pages
  • Use an Advanced Software Development Tool: 4-6 pages

In the last two types of projects, the report should include a link to the repository / replication package hosting the your tool and/or experiments scripts and data.