CSE 260 Research Projects

(Fall 2009)

One of the goals of CSE 260 is to teach you how to conduct research. A research project is a formal requirement of the course and counts for 45% of your grade. A project may be done individually, but many projects are better suited to a team of 2. Extreme programming is an extremely helpful technique in parallel programming! You should allow 5 weeks to complete the project. Your project grade will be based on your successful completion of the following 4 parts:

  1. Project proposal: due week 4, Thu. 10/15 (1/10 of the project grade)
  2. Progress report: due week 7, Thu. 11/12 (electronic, 1/10 of the project grade) note date change
  3. In class presentation: week 10 (2/10 of your project grade).
    Bring a hard copy of your slides to class.
    Your allotted time will depend on the size of your group as follows:
  4. Solo: 18 minutes
  5. Teams of 2: 20 minutes
  6. Teams of 3: 22 minutes
  7. Final Report: due Friday, December 4th at 5PM, in EBU3B 3244 (Hard copy and electronic, 6/10 of the project grade).
    Be sure to read these Turnin instructions

Here are some Project Ideas. If you have a project in mind that is not on the list, let me know and we can discuss it.

Your project proposal should address the following issues. Note that your responses may be tentative, and you can revisit them in the progress report.

  1. What are the goals of your project? Are they realistic?
  2. What are your hypotheses?
  3. What is your experimental method for proving or disproving your hypotheses.
  4. What experimental result(s) do you need to demonstrate?
  5. What would be the significance of those results?
  6. What code will you need to implement? What software packages or previously written software will you rely on?
  7. Describe the tentative division of labor among the team members.
The proposal should also include the investigator names, the title of the project, and a preliminary list of milestones—with completion dates—and possible options depending on your progress. Be realistic, but remember that your milestones are not binding and you can fine-tune them as the project is underway. (This is fine so long as you document your decisions.)

The progress report will help keep you on a steady pace and enable you to make mid-course corrections. The report should

  1. discuss your progress to date. If you are working in a team, include a self-evaluation discussing the division of labor and other aspects of how you worked together as a team team (A copy of the form is available in html)
  2. revise any milestones and completion dates that you established previously, including an explanation.

In evaluating your proposal and progress report I will check to see if your goals are realistic. A realistic project that is completed successfully will likely receive a higher grade than one that is too ambitious and doesn't get finished. Results alone are not adequate. You need to interpret them. If you have any questions about this, be sure and see me. If you do have an ambitious design, we can work together to set realistic goals.

The project should be a polished piece of work. To get an idea of what I expect, read some previous project reports.

Submit hard copy as well as an electronic version, e.g., html with ASCII and other attachments. Be sure to read this document about project requirements which discusses what I am looking for in the report, along with instructions for submitting an electronic copy.

Maintained by baden @ ucsd.
 edu   [ Sat Nov 21 21:48:27 PST 2009]