Paper Summary Guidelines

Submission: by email before class

Length: ~1 page (definitely no more than 2 pages)

Suggested Content:

• Summary of the paper:
  • Motivation, what is the target problem
  • What was proposed and/or implemented
  • What are the evaluation methodology and results
• Evaluation of the paper
  • Strength/contributions
  • Weakness/limitations
  • Novel idea or solid implementation?
• Original thinking
  • Extensions of the work
  • Same/similar idea applied to other problems

Project Proposal Guidelines

Submission: by email before midnight of 03/19

Length: 2~3 pages

Suggested Content:

The main purpose of a proposal is to convince others that 1) you are working on an important problem that is worth investigating; 2) you have a reasonable chance of doing the work in the available time.  Therefore, your proposal should include:

• A description of the project.  Include the motivation and any necessary background that can help others to understand your proposal.
• A description of what you plan to accomplish and how you plan to get it done.  A tentative schedule might help in communicating this.
• Any preliminary result/set-up if you have started working on this project. 
• Any backup plan in case the initial attempt fail.

Unacceptable proposals will be returned for improvement, and you will have less time to do the work!

Important dates:

03/19: project proposal due   (6%)
04/13: project progress report due  (4%)
05/04: in-class presentation  (10%)
05/10: final report due  (20%)

Project Total: 40% of the final score

Project Presentation Guidelines

Date & Deliverables. May 4th in class (except for Dan).  A final version of your presentation slides is due by May 5th.  Note that even though the final report and associated project material such as the source code is not due until May 10, you should have your main results ready for in-class presentations scheduled for May 4.

Presentation Length.  Each person has 25 minutes, including questions. 20 minute presentation plus 5 minute Q&A is suggested.  Time keeping is important.

Presentation Equipment.  Email your .ppt or .pdf file to Dr. Zhong by 6pm on the day of your presentation, or bring it in a CD or removable disk.  You will only have time for minor adjustments and need to consider the compatibility between your file and Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac. 

Presentation Content.  The following flow is suggested:

• Cover page.  You need to have an appropriate title, author, course information, and date.
• Introduction.
  • Motivation/background to the general problem, including previous research on the subject.
  • Description of your specific research question and the key challenges.
  • Outline of the talk.
• Proposed approach/Implementation.  The emphasis may vary depending on your project topic.
  • Present and justify your hypotheses if applicable.
  • Key idea of your solution, system design or model description.
  • Appropriate implementation details: software tools, algorithms, issues and solutions, etc.
• Evaluation.
  • Methodology: benchmarks, platforms, experiments, metrics, etc.
  • Results and discussion: can you explain the results? do they validate your hypotheses?  do you learn anything surprising?
• Conclusion/Summary.
  • Status: any results to be generated? which parts of the original proposal implemented / to be implemented / cancelled? why?
  • Discuss the significance of your results: any conclusions?
  • Summarize your contributions in terms of tasks accomplished as well as new skills learned.  Do you achieve what you wanted to achieve? Any special experience to share?
  • Future work: possible extensions and/or applications.
• References and acknowledgements. Do not forget to acknowledge anyone who helped in your project, including those who provided the software tool / benchmarks.

Presentation Skill Suggestions. 

• Practice, practice, practice!
• Prepare good slides with readable fonts, appropriate examples, graphs, tables, and animations.  Generally, do not write paragraphs or long sentences and expect others to read them.
• Do not speak too fast.  Give time to your audience to digest your words.
• Make smooth transitions.  Help your audience to switch between topics.
• Stress what is important.
• Keep to the allotted time.  Be prepared for dynamic adaptations.

Project Final Report Guidelines

Date & Deliverables.  A PDF or WORD version of the final project report must be submitted by May 10th.  This is a hard deadline, no extensions will be granted.  If your project involves programming effort, turn in a copy of your program with README and necessary comments.  If you perform instrumentation or obfuscation, turn in the transformed programs as well.  You do not need to submit original benchmarks, but be sure to document them clearly.  All associated project materials should be packed into a .tar.gz or tar.zip file and submitted by May 10.

General Advice.  The final report should be a well-presented technical writing about your project.  It is the principal means by which the project is assessed. A good final report should be detailed enough to allow the readers to evaluate your work, yet not tedious to read.  As the presentation, you should stress what is important and highlight what you are aimed to achieve and how you achieved them.  The guidelines here are general.  Your report is highly dependent on the project topic and the work you have done.

It is mandatory to check the spelling and grammar before submission.  Contact GMU Writing Center if assistance is needed.

Length. About 3,500 ~ 4,500 words (excluding appendices).  This should be approximately 10 ~ 15 pages -- excluding the title page and appendices if applicable -- for single-space format with font size no greater than 12-point Times New Roman for the main text.  Maximum number of words is 5,500.

Plagiarism.  It is essential to have an honest and scientific attitude.  Your submission must be original and with all source quoted.  Direct quotations must be indicated with quotation marks and references.  Check here and here for how to recognize and avoid plagiarism.  Violations of GMU Honor Code will result in an F.

Format.  This is only a suggested format.  Not all sections are mandatory. 

• Title. You should first list the title of the project, the author, the date,  the course number, and the name of the instructor. 
• Abstract. A short (100 words or less) abstract that summarizes the content and the contribution of the report.
• Introduction.  Background information: what is the problem and why you are motivated to work on it.
• Main body.  The main part that describes your proposal and reports the research effort.  No source code other than sketches of algorithms should be included here.
• Evaluation.  Describe the methodology of your experiments, report and discuss results.
• Related work. Give a brief summary of related work.  It is especially important to compare your work and alternative approaches to the same problem proposed by others.
• Conclusions & future work. Summarize what you have achieved in this project and discuss possible extensions/applications.  It is a good idea to refer back to your proposal at this point.
• Acknowledgements. 
• References.  List all previous publications that are directly quoted or used in your report.  References to these publications must be made appropriately within the text.
• Appendices.  Optional for source code, software manual, etc.
• If you failed to achieve items listed in your proposal,  or switched to the back-up plan,  or changed the topic of your project, be sure to have a special sub-section discussing the reasons and issues.

Survey Paper.  If you are writing a survey paper, follow the conventions of ACM Computing Surveys.  Check Editorial Charter for general requirements and read papers published in that journal for samples.  The paper should provide a detailed overview of a specific area, but should NOT be composed as a collection of paper abstracts or summaries.  Your survey should provide a comprehensive coverage of the selected area and address the following issues:

• Introduce the importance of the area you discuss.
• Classify different approaches proposed in the area.
• Compare the classified approaches with pros/cons.
• Identify the state-of-the-art work and the latest trends in the area.
• Discuss existing limitations, open problems, and potentials.
• Extensive quoting and paraphrasing are not acceptable.  All figures and tables must be original.
• Provide novel perspectives and original insights.  The originality is an important element in evaluating the report.