CS561 Final Projects

Due Date

At the start of our PROJECT PRESENTATIONS and DEMONSTRATIONS day on the 29th of April, namely, in-class on the last day of our course, all deliverables are due.

Deliverables:

The following deliverables are due:

The final project presentation in class,
A demonstration of your software in class ( and in some circumstances an additional demonstration to the instructor off-line may be requested),
The associated project report (in hardcopy and via email in softcopy so they are linked into our course webpage), and
The presentation overheads (in hardcopy), and
A softcopy of your final project report, slides and code - so that it can be independently verified -- (URL/email/or CD).

There is no required minimum or maximum length of the final project report. However, they tend to typically range between 15 to 25 pages (code excluded). It needs to be more comprehensive than a good number of the project progresses you have turned in. I gave you feedback on your project progress, and if in doubt ask. Also, of course, you can "reuse" fully your project progress report as starting point for your final report.

Content of Report

Your written report should roughly contain the following sections :

COVER PAGE. You need to have an appropriate title, authors, an abstract, and keywords.
OVERVIEW and GOALS. A clear outline of the project you tackled, and a description of your project goals. Here you need to describe why you selected this project, including what techniques or tools you wanted to learn about and/or what project goals you wanted to achieve. This must include a precise characterization of the problem you are solving, of your application requirements, and/or of potential uses of your system.
BACKGROUND MATERIAL. Give here all specific background material that your work is based on. Your report should be self-contained, describing carefully any concepts you make use of, especially if there were not covered as part of the course material. As examples, this could include a description of the DBMS and other tools you are using, including their architecture, features, etc. A description of other systems or reports about such systems that have done similar work? Cite any manuals or references you made use of, as well as any literature you had reviewed.
YOUR SOLUTION.
- GENERAL APPROACH: Give a description of the overall approach you took to address problem, and give a justification of your strategy.
- DESIGN AND ITS JUSTIFICATION : Provide object diagrams for the design of your system, the design of any database schemas involved, and so on.
- IMPLEMENTATION AND SYSTEM DETAILS: Provide details on the architecture of your systems, and the integration of tools. Do list here also which code you actually wrote, and which software was made use of from other students, other projects and/or commercial tools.
- ISSUES: Indicate any problems you encountered, if they still persist or how you have manged to address them.
- RESULTS AND VALIDATION OF YOUR APPROACH: This is a very important part of this report. Here you need to include how you have validated that your ideas are good. Also indicate if you have a fully working system that is running (on what platform, what input, and so on)? Which part of it is not working? What experiments and /or sample data sets have you run? How do you know your system works?
LESSONS LEARNED. Describe your experience of what you have learned, e.g., what skills you practiced or new tools and techniques you worked with. Describe whether you would do this project again the same way, or if not, what you would recommend doing differently to a new team that say wanted to continue upon your project.
MEMBER CONTRIBUTION: List the tasks and amount of respective effort that each member of the team was involved in. This should include a table indicating who worked on the database design, on the software design, who installed what tool, who had to learn Java or other such languages, who was responsible for creating the first draft of the progress talk, who gave the presentation, who wrote what module, who debugged the system, etc. I want to know here which part of the project can be attributed to which student, or if all aspects of the project were done in tight collaboration.
CONCLUSIONS: Describe the contributions of your project. This is project complete? Did you meet all goals that you have set out to do initially? If not, list what you have NOT managed to accomplish and why.
FUTURE WORK: Give potential tasks for future research work or to make your tool into a really usable and practical system, assuming you were given one more semester to work on this project (say in another follow-on course).
APPENDIX. Include any material relevant for your project, this may include detailed sample data sets, diagrams, and detailed background material. Include your actual code, or point to a webpage where your code is accessible.

Presentation Logistics

Project presentations and demonstration are about 15 minutes per project.

Please be ready for a brief question-and-answer-session during or at the end of your presentation.

Please be ready at start of class for having your system set up. You are encouraged to coordinate with others in the class so that your system is loaded and ready to go immediately within your time slot.

You are strongly encouraged to give a demo as part of your presentation as a working system is required in order or your project to be considered successfully completed. And, in fact, it may be possible to cover most of the issues you want to touch upon (see topics to be covered below) based on walking through a life demonstration of your system. In the worst case, if your system is not working, do provide some sample screen dumps or system runs.

Advice: Also be ready for your system to fail, and make a contigence plan of having full overheads as backup.

In addition, your team may be asked to provide also a more in-depth demonstration to the instructor of the course within one week after this final presentation. Such an off-line demonstration would then be a requirement in order to receive a grade for your project.

Content of Presentation

Your project presentation should only contain the most impressive highlights of your system, ideally illustrated via a demo. Do not spend much time on well-known background material; rather go into what makes your project unique, interesting and challenging. Also, you need to justify why you have developed this system, what where the most challenging portion of it, what are its most interesting features, any evaluation or experimental study, and what have you learned about doing this project and you now would do differently the second time around.

Final Project Grading

The maxinum score for this final project is 100 pts. This will count towards 70% of your total score for the final course project (project 3); while 20% of the final course project grade was given for the project progress report and 10% for the project proposal. The grade of this assignment will be given using the following grading guideline:

the oral project presentation itself including any overhead slides; if for time reasons no presentation can be given, then i'll use the prepared material and possibly offline demo to judge your readiness. (is it clear, well-organized, understandable and informative?) [15pts.]
the written project report (is it well organized, complete, informative, and off professional quality?) [25pts.]
the demonstration of your system, including successful examples runs, hopefully live in class or otherwise off-line in the instructor's office. [25 pts]
the difficulty and size of your completed project, the sophistication of the solution, and the amount of work you have accomplished. (I want to clearly see which functionalities of the final system you have actually working at the end.). [20pts].
the amount of testing and evaluation of your system that has been completed and illustrated; do you have detailed example files you tested? do you have a test plan showing which cases are definitely working correctly, and which ones are not? possibly did you try out some benchmark data sets? [15pts].
the contribution of each team member to the project. This will be used to upgrade or downgrade the score for an individual member. The default is that all team members will get the same score, unless there is some inequality of effort. inc [+/-]