The centerpiece of CSE222A is the term project, which culminates in a workshop-quality paper and a public presentation. You are encouraged to think carefully about the project topic and scope, as I expect that a number of the projects, with some amount of extra polishing and follow-up work, will be submittable to a high-quality venue. Indeed, students with successful projects from recent CSE222A offerings earned all-expense-paid trips to present their work at international conferences in places like Austin, Texas; Hong Kong; and Bern, Switzerland.

Of course, time is limited. The key to a successful project is to carefully lay out a plan of action so that some significant portion---but frequently far from all---of it can be completed in time to write up and present at the end of the term. Projects will be graded in the same manner that conference papers are evaluated: we're looking for interesting insights, clarity of presentation, and appropriate positioning of your work within the framework of existing research. From the point of view of the class, the goal of the project is to give you first hand experience conducting research in networking and exploring a topic that interests you in more detail than we well in class.

Each project will be presented orally during the official final exam period for the course (and possibly in additional sessions as logistics require). Groups will also submit an 8-10 page research report describing their efforts. All class members are required to attend and evaluate their classmates presentations and papers.

Projects should be done in groups of two or three. Exceptions may occasionally be granted; please talk to the instructor.

Timeline

To assist in the timely completion of the project, we have established the following checkpoints.

1/24: Each student is required to submit two or three brief (a paragraph or two, maximum) project ideas by email. We will then post the submitted ideas to the class through Piazza. Students who have already formed (partial) project groups should submit a single email naming each of the group members.

1/29: After consulting the project idea list and communicating privately with other students, students are encouraged to form their own project group. Each group should send email to the me with the members of the group and a brief description of the project idea(s).

2/05: Each group must submit a page-long project proposal. The proposal should contain four sections:

2/19: Each group will submit a 1-2 page summary of their progress. We will schedule meetings with each project group to discuss the status updates.

3/07: Submit a 1-2 page summary of your progress since the last checkpoint. In particular, concisely describe the deliverables you have completed, and provide a brief preview of what you expect to present during the term project presentations.

3/21 All groups will give a 20-minute presentation, with an additional 3-4 minutes afterwards for questions. All group members are expected to participate in the presentation and answer questions. In addition, students are expected to attend three presentations in addition to their own and actively participate by asking questions of the presenters. This will count toward your class participation grade.

3/22: Final project reports are due by midnight. All groups are expected to submit an 8-10 page project report in the format of the papers we've read in class (i.e., double column, single spaced). You are free to submit in another format, but it is likely the report will be much longer in, e.g., single column double spaced. The report should include references and citations to related work, as well as graphs, figures, etc., documenting the performance of your software prototype to the extent possible.

Please email your final report, along with either a tarball of or pointers to (e.g., in github or similar) your code, to me.


Last updated: 2019-03-21 14:42:44 -0700 [validate xhtml]