Carnegie Mellon University
15-826 Multimedia Databases and Data Mining
Spring 2005 - C. Faloutsos
PROJECT INFORMATION
1. Preliminaries
There are three graded parts to the project: the project proposal
(10%), the progress report (10%) and the final report
(80%).
The proposal will be a short writeup describing what you plan to do and
how you plan to do it. The progress report will be a more extensive
writeup,
describing the work performed up to then, and the revised plans for the
whole project. It mainly serves as a `checkpoint', to detect and
prevent
dead-ends and other problems early on. The report will be a more
detailed
description of what you did, what results you obtained, and what you
have
learned and/or can conclude from your work. Proposals and final
projects
will be carried out in teams of 1-3 persons.
2. The Project
You and your partner(s) should begin by selecting a topic for your
project.
A list of suggested projects gives some suggestions. You are free to
pick
a different topic to suit your interests.
In that case,
you'll need to get the instructor's approval on your choice of
topic, meaning that you'll need to justify that the topic is
interesting,
relevant to the course, and challenging enough.
Joint projects with other courses are also negotiable.
In that case, make sure you get the approval of the instructor,
and also clarify exactly what steps will be done for our course,
as well as for the other course.
Once you have selected a topic,
you should do some background reading
so that you are capable of describing, in some detail, exactly what you
expect to accomplish. For example, if you decide that you want to
implement
some new proposal for a multidimensional file structure, you will have
to carefully read the paper that proposes the structure in order to
know
(1) what will be involved, and (2) what design decisions you will be
faced
with along the way. Once you have read up on your topic, you will be
ready
to write your proposal.
3. First Deliverable: The
Proposal
The proposal should describe what you plan to do for your project. It
should
describe the problem that you will be addressing, how you plan to
address
it, what tools (e.g., "yacc", Postgres, SP2, etc.) you will need for
your
work, what you expect to produce as a result of your work, and anything
else that you think the instructor should know to evaluate your plans. You
should also describe what portion of the project each partner will be
doing.
Your proposal should be approximately 6-8 pages long,
typed
(eg., latex/postscript), double-spaced, neat, and with pictures if they
seem useful (`idraw' and `xfig' are good choices). Also, the
proposal should be self-contained. For example,
don't just say: "We plan to implement Smith's Foo-Tree
data structure [Smith86], and we will study its performance."
Instead, you should briefly review the key ideas in the references, and
describe clearly the alternatives that you will be examining.
Important points:
- Grading scheme: 60% for the survey; 30% for innovation; 10% for
plan of activities
- please provide a plan of activities and time estimates,
per group member.
- Your survey should have at least 3 papers or book chapters
per group member (outside the reading list)
- Optional latex
template (you are strongly recommended to follow
its
outline).
4. Second Deliverable: The
Progress Report
This should be a 10-15 page long report, and it serves as
a check-point. It should consist of the same sections as your final
report
(introduction, survey, etc), with a few sections `under construction'.
Specifically, the introduction and survey sections should be in their
final
form;
the section on the proposed method should be almost finished; the
sections on the experiments and conclusions will have whatever results
you have obtained, as well as `place-holders' for the results you
plan/hope to obtain.
Grading scheme for the project report:
- 70% for proposed method (should be almost finished)
- 25% for the design of upcoming experiments
- 5% for plan of activities (in an appendix, please show the old
one and
the revised one, along with the activities of each group member)
5. Third deliverable: The
Final Report
Your final report is expected to be a 20-30 pages long report, treating
in depth the agreed topic. A detailed grading scheme will be posted on
the class web site in time.
The report for "theoretical" projects should include an introduction
section, a survey section, your contributions (proofs, ideas,
algorithms,
simulation results etc.), problems for future research and a list of
references.
For implementation projects, the report should include an
introduction,
a survey, your contributions (major design decisions, rationale, timing
results), problems for future research, a list of references, a brief
description
of the developed modules, a user's manual and a programmer's manual.
For
implementation projects, careful packaging for distribution and a demonstration
is also expected (a sample package with a 'makefile' is here
- gunzip | tar xvf ; make ).
6. Due Dates
As announced in the course schedule
7. Poster session
We will have all projects presenting a poster, on
Friday April 29, 12noon - 4pm.
At least one project member should be present during the poster hours. The
session will be open to
everybody (SCS, CIT, INTEL, etc).
Last modified: 1/12/2005 by Christos Faloutsos