Course Project

Students can form teams of 2 people or work individually. The project should address data management issues related to the course material. Students are welcome to discuss their ideas with the instructor (and other faculty in the database group) throughout the semester.

Milestones

Form groups (Due Feb 12, before class)

Find a project partner and begin to discuss project ideas.

Project proposal (Due March 12, before class)

Your proposal should explicitly state the following:

1. Problem your project will address.
2. Your project's goal and motivation.
3. Areas of related work. Your survey of the related work should place a particular focus on how existing work differs from your proposed work and why it is insufficent for solving the problem you propose. Through this survey, you should be able to convince the reader that you are addressing something fundamentally new, either a brand new problem or a novel approach to a known problem.
4. The methodology and plan for your project. Be sure to structure your plan for the project as a set of incremental milestones and include a schedule for meeting them.
5. The resources needed to carry out your project.

Please email your proposal to both the TA and the instructor before class on the due date.

Midterm status report (Due Apr 16, before class)

Your status report should contain enough implementation, data, and analysis to show that your project is on the right track. You should revise your original proposal to accommodate the instructor's comments, along with any surprising results or changes in direction, schedule, etc. You sometimes also need to have a refined version of the problem statement as well as a more developed related work section.

Again, email your status report to both the TA and the instructor before class on the due date.

Project presentation (May 7 and 12, in class)

A brief presentation should include the proposed problem, state-of-the-art solutions, your proposed solutions including the algorithms and implementation, and evaluation results. The presentation may include a system demo if appropriate.

Project report (Due May 19, 5 pm)

A final report extends your previous writeups to

1. present the research problem and summarize your contributions (in the first section),
2. survey related work (in the related work section),
3. include a detailed description of your algorithm, analysis, and implementation (in the technical section),
4. describe evaluation methodology and significant results (in the evaluation section), and
5. finally present your conclusions (in the summary section).
6. For team work, the report should also include a paragraph explaining, for each group member, their contributions and duties in the project.

Email your final report to the TA and the instructor by 5 pm on May 19.