Writing Your Project Reports

Project Proposal Report

Recommended structure for the Proposal Report is:

  • Title + abstract.
  • Related work: Need to have >=15 references, about 1 page (2 columns of USENIX paper template). Reference could be papers, websites (e.g., GitHub repos, Internet articles, blog entries, etc.).
  • Motivation + concrete problem statement (need not be formal, only concrete).
  • Approaches/system_design/experiment_design planned to solving problems: Initial thoughts + what you have done in design/setups/experimental_tests.
  • Timeline/Expected milestones for achieving your goals.

Important

The deadline of proposal report is 11:59pm Oct 26. 3-4 (2-column) pages for main material + any number of pages for references. You should use the USENIX latex template. To submit, do the following: Email your proposal report as an email attachment (pdf only) with Subject line “CS795 Proposal Report” to yuecheng at gmu dot edu .

Project Checkpoint Report

Your Project Checkpoint Report needs to have (1) some algorithms, (2) some initial implementation, and (3) most importantly, some initial experimental data (mandatory!) that you collect by running some preliminary experiments. While writing the checkpoint report, you may want to think about, and address the following questions head-on about your work:

  • Question 0: What are your techniques?
  • Question 1: What do your techniques gain you?
  • Question 2: What do your techniques lose you? That is, what are the tradeoffs.
  • Question 3: What do your experiments tell you? Show that your data supports your hypothesis, and show the gains, losses, and tradeoffs by using your techniques.

Please ensure that your plots print ok on black and white printouts. It is ok to use color, but you cannot solely rely on color to distinguish datapoints or datalines.

Important

The deadline of Project Checkpoint Report is 00:00am Nov 21. At most 7 pages (including the proposal content) for main material + any number of pages for references. You should use the USENIX latex template. To submit, do the following: Email your report as an email attachment (pdf only) with Subject line “CS795 Project Checkpoint Report” to yuecheng at gmu dot edu .

Project Final Report

The final deliverable of this course is a conference-quality paper. Focus on the following Questions 0 through 5 (an extended version of Question 0 through 3 in the Checkpoint Report requirement):

  • Question 0: What is/are your main hypothesis/hypotheses in the project? This is a one-sentence summary of your paper. Position your paper w.r.t. other related work on the same or even similar problems (reuse relevant parts of your survey report here!). Show to the reader that your work is on a unique point in the design spectrum. Don’t overstate it, don’t understate it either. This statement is related to Question 5 below (yes, it’s a chicken and egg problem!)
  • Question 1: What are your goals?
  • Question 2: What are your techniques?
  • Question 3: What do your techniques gain you?
  • Question 4: What do your techniques lose you? That is, what are the tradeoffs.
  • Question 5: What do your experiments tell you? (This is related to Question 0, 3, 4 above, and again, it’s an egg and chicken problem!) Show that your data supports your hypothesis, and show the gains, losses, and tradeoffs by using your techniques.

As well as pay attention to:

  • Importance of problem,
  • Novelty of solution,
  • Evaluation of solution,
  • Clarity of Presentation,
  • Nits (grammar, references, etc.).

It is common that the implementation or experimental methodology gets adapted in the course of your investigation. And therefore, given that this is your final write-up, please make sure to refine/change/expand your texts in your Checkpoint Report to reflect your latest implementation & evaluation activities. A few examples are listed as follows: 1. if you had promised to use AWS EC2 (in your proposal or checkpoint report), but in fact you are using a local testbed; 2. if you had promised to hack into Kubernetes’ UI, but later on you found a better walkaround that works better.

Please ensure that your plots print ok on black and white printouts. It is ok to use color, but you cannot solely rely on color to distinguish datapoints or datalines.

Important

The deadline of Final Project Report is 11:59pm Dec 19 (Wednesday). At most 12 pages for main material + any number of pages for references. The 12 pages does not include references. You should use the USENIX latex template. To submit, do the following: Email your report as an email attachment (pdf only) with Subject line “CS795 Final Project Report” to yuecheng at gmu dot edu. Please DO NOT post your final report on publicly accessible repositories such as GitHub or BitBucket.