CSE 490D Project Report

Title of Project

Names of group members

Project Final Report

Your final project report will be in the form of a workshop paper submission. The paper should be 15-18 pages in length in the format provided (it is not very dense and figures take up space, too!). You will more than likely end up generating a lot more than this if you do a good job on documenting all aspects of your project. Here is a template with instructions.

Your target audience is students entering this course (think of yourself at the beginning of the course) that are going to build on your project. They would need to understand why it is interesting, why your work will save them a lot of time, and how to reconstruct your project. Documenting the design decisions you have made along the way – both why you picked one option AND why you rejected another, is an important part of this.

It would be especially nice if tutorial information about specific devices, software, and/or interfaces and how to deal with them is placed in a separate appendix so that it can be easily distributed to future students. We will give extra credit for a great job on this.

Below is a basic outline of the report which you should use as a guideline. Please do your best to cover all the points listed.

Abstract. Short description of your project, what you accomplished, and what conclusions you were able to draw. This should be in the range of 250-300 words.
Introduction. Problem description including a typical scenario of use. What problem does your project try to solve? What is interesting or hard about this problem? What do people do now? What is your basic idea and how will it make things better?
Related Work. What have others done - both closely and loosely related? It is important to make sure you do a good job of this and draw upon a wide range of information sources including the university libraries, conferences and journals in the area, magazines and popular press, newsletters, and, of course, web searches. Feel free to build on what 419 students did in Winter but go further. In particular make sure you do a survey of related technologies, not just research projects – doing a technological competitive analysis.
Approach. How are you going about realizing your idea? What are the main pieces? Why did you choose these pieces? How do they interact? How generally reusable will these pieces be?
Implementation. Describe the choices you had to make that were not obvious. What was hard about getting things to work? What tradeoffs did you have to consider? You also want to talk about how things could have been implemented better if you had more resources or more time.
Evaluation. How are you evaluating your solution? Evaluation has both technical aspects as well as usability aspects. Who are your target users and who did you use as surrogates? How well does it work? Use both qualitative and quantitative approaches and relate the evaluation back to the scenario.
Societal Implications. What impact would you expect your project to have in the contexts you considered? Consider any relevant subset of privacy, security, social relationships, cultural impacts, strengthening/weakening of user values, stress levels.
Conclusion and Future Work. What are the next steps to take and why? What lessons did you learn? What would you differently next time? How could the solution be improved upon further?
Acknowledgements. Who helped you along the way this quarter and how?
References. Everything papers, magazine articles, data sheets, web resources, interviews, surveys that helped you understand the issues. Make sure they are all cited in the body of the paper.
Appendices. All the material you would need to reconstruct your project: source code, schematics, installation and configuration instructions, etc. (NOTE: this does not have to conform to the format provided and can be completely in the form of web pages, if desired). You should also include evaluation instruments (surveys, interview protocols etc.) in the appendices as well.