Project Schedule (check the calendar)

P1: Groups (1%)
 The team name, and the team members (1-3)
P2: Proposal (9%)
 Your proposal should be about 1 page in length. Suggested content:
  • Project title, team members
  • A short description of the project
  • A short list of references (at least 1 reference, but not more than 5)
  • What tools, datasets, and systems you are planning to use
  • Do you have access to these tools right now? If not, what is your plan?
P3: Milestone report (60%)
 3-4 pages in length. Suggested content:
  • The description of the problem you are trying to solve
  • The description of your approach
  • A description of related work. How does your approach compare with what has been done before. Suggestion: cite about 3 papers. Don't worry about finding *all* the existing related work. Our worry here is not the novelty of your project. The goal is for you to learn that placing your work in perspective of what has been done before is a crucial step in research. For the purpose of the class, we expect your related work to be incomplete.
  • A description of what you have accomplished so far and any problems or unexpected issues that you encountered.
  • A brief plan for the rest of the quarter. This plan must include the experiments you will conduct to evaluate your solution.
P4: Project Posters Presentations (60%)
Wednesday, March 6, 9am - 1pm, Microsoft Atrium Prepare a poster and present. Suggestions for the poster:
  • Include a motivation
  • Include a problem definition
  • Describe your approach: this may include algorithms/formulas/screenshots
  • Include an example: could be running example (i.e. you return to it repeatedly), or single larger example
  • Experimental evaluation: this should include graphs, or numerical tables
  • Hint: on a poster, a figure convey more information than plain text.
  • A poster is large. A conservative way to use that space is to place 6 or 8 slides next to each other. You can also come up with a more creative way, but usually that requires serious design skills.
P5: Final report (20%)
 Start from the project milestone, and extend it to a 6-7 pages report. Suggestion for the additional content:
  • Improve and expand the presentation of your approach
  • Improve and expand the presentation of the related work, by describe at some technical level how your approach is similar to, or different from related work.
  • Include an evaluation section, with graphs.
  • For multi-person projects, please discuss how the work was divided.
  • Conclusions: what have you learned? Did wish you have done something differently?

Choosing a project

You have two options: you can start from one of the project ideas listed here, or you can define your own database project that is related to research in your main research area, or any combination thereof.

What is expected

Good class projects can vary dramatically in complexity, scope, and topic. The only requirement is that they be related to something we have studied in this class and that they contain some element of research or that they involve a significant engineering effort. To help you determine if your idea is appropriate and of reasonable scope, we will provide you feedback throughout the quarter.

Using AWS

We encourage you to use Amazon AWS for your projects. In fact, you can sign up to receive free credits! Check out this page for more info.

Example of older, successful projects