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CS276A / SYMBSYS 239I / LING 239I |
Guidelines for the Final Project Submission
Projects are due on Tuesday, Dec. 3
The final submission consists of your source code, a writeup, and any slides you will be using during your in-class presentation. The final writeups and slides will be made available online; if you would like, the final source code submissions will also be made available online.
Submission Mechanics:
Each group has a subdirectory in /afs/ir/class/cs276a/submit/ where they should copy their files. The following needs to be copied over to your subdirectory:
- The final project writeup: It must be named writeup.{doc,pdf,html}. If you are using HTML, and have supplementary images, they must be in a subdirectory named images/.
- The final project source code: The source tree must be in a subdirectory named src/ within your group's directory. Please include a short README file in your source tree describing the code briefly, and stating whether or not you would like it made available online.
- The overview slides: Include the slides you will be using on Thursday, Dec. 5 during the in-class presentation. This file must be named slides.{ppt,pdf}. The slides may be submitted by noon Wednesday, Dec. 4. You will have only 3 minutes to present, so keep it short and to the point. It's ok if only 1 member of the groups speaks.
The project writeup and source code must be copied over by Tuesday Dec. 3, 11:59pm. The slides may be copied over by Wednesday, Dec. 4, 12:00pm.
Writeup Guidelines:
The project writeup will be a very important factor in determining your project grade -- you should clearly and concisely describe the research problem, your idea, your implementation, and your experimental/evaluation results. A reasonable length for the writeup is 6-8 pages, including figures and graphs. Do not exceed 8 pages, and use a reasonable font size (11pt). Also useful are the practicum lecture slides, particularly Practicum 2 [1 | 2].
To get a sense of what we are looking for, you should read over at least one or two academic research papers if you have not already done so -- the "additional resources" column of the syllabus is a good place to find papers. For instance, Prof. Junghoo Cho's paper on parallel crawlers. For any third-party resources or ideas you made use of in your project, you must include references in a bibliography, and cite them in your text.
A good source for style files for LaTeX or Word is at ACM SIG Proceedings Templates (make sure to remove the ACM copyright footer though). You may use either 1 or 2 column format. Your final submission may be in pdf, MS Word, or well-formed html. pdf/html are preferred since we plan to make the final writeups available on the Web, and those on Unix cannot always read MS Word files easily -- this won't impact grading however.
Some additional tips:
- Give your paper a descriptive title.
- Include your names and contact information.
- Include a bibliography, and cite prior work as necessary.
- Use graphs and figures with informative captions and clearly labeled axes to help explain your system and results.
- Make sure you explain your methodology clearly, and justify any decisions you made. Having made incorrect decisions is ok, as long as you explain why they seemed justified, and explain why another approach may have been better in retrospect.
- Analysis of tradeoffs is important; of course you may not have had time to analyze every tradeoff in the system, but you should at least describe a few in detail.
- You must at least briefly describe and cite related and prior work, to put your project in context.
- Provide a URL for your demo if it has a web interface, or provide instructions on how to run your code from the command line if it has no web interface.
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Last modified: Mon Dec 2 17:19:29 PST 2002