CSE 145- Tasks: Final Report

Final Report

The final report should be written for a technical audience, but you should not assume that they know anything about your project before reading the report. The goal of the final report is to describe the project, highlighting the novel aspects, summarize the progress over the quarter, and describe the technical aspects of the work. This report should be posted on your website as a doc, docx or pdf file. Please notify the two instructors and the TA when you post your final report on your website.

This report should be in the form of a “white-paper”. This term more or less relates to the formatting of the report (you can find plenty of examples of white papers online). In our case, it is expected to be around 6-8 pages (single column, single spaced, 1" margins in 10 point font), and contains the following sections. These are not inclusive (meaning you can have more), but these are mandatory and will be closely scrutinized:

1. Abstract - A few sentence overview of the entire document. This provides the reader an overview of the paper, and will be the primary factor as to whether they will read the document. Hence it is extremely important. It should be no more than 120 words.
2. Introduction - A longer version of the abstract. This provides a high level overview of the research area and distinctly summarizes (in a few bullet points) the contributions of the article. This should be around 1-2 pages.
3. Technical Material - The next portion of the paper makes up the bulk of the paper, and can be organized in several sections; the organization depends heavily on the specific project.
4. Milestones - This section should describe the milestones that you stated at the beginning of the quarter, the revisions that you made in the middle of the quarter. It should provide details on the milestones that you did and did not achieve, with an explanation on why you did not achieve any milestones. It should also discuss the problems that you encountered over the quarter and how you managed them. This is not in a typical technical paper.
5. Conclusion - A summary of the work, highlighting the significance of the problem, the specific goals and contributions of the project and a discussion on possible future work. This is less than 1 pages
6. References - Any references that you cited in the document