COP5570 term group project information

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Important dates:

Project proposal: March 4 (half a page listing group members, and describing
what you propose to doand why it is [interesting|important|useful] and related). 
Project feedback: March 6
Project finalized: March 18
Progress report: March 27, April 10
Project presentation/demo: April 17-April 24
Project report/software submission: April 26
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Group size: 1, 2, or 3 people

Project objective: To apply the techniques learned in COP5570 to some
research and/or practical applications.

A project may be a research project or a development project or a combination
of both. The relative weight for research and development components will be
determined based on the nature of the project. Projects with no significant
research components should have significant development components. Projects
with research components must also have some development components. 

Grading: Grading will be based on six elements: project proposal
progress reports, project presentation and demo (final week of the class),
project report/software.

Participation: 20% (proposal, biweekly progress reports, report, demo)
Research and development: 80% (presentation + demo + software + report)

Research components:
   1) The significance of the application or problem. (presentation + report)
   2) The survey of the state of the art. (presentation + report)
   3) The novelty of the proposed techniques (presentation + report)
   4) The completeness of the implementation and evaluation
      (presentation + report)

Development components:
   1) Software usefulness and correctness (demo + software)
   2) Software scope (demo + software)
   3) The challenges/novelty of software implementation techniques
      (demo + software + presentation + report).
   4) the completeness of the evaluation (presentation+report)

Biweekly progress reports: graded by the instructor/TA

Project presentation/demo: graded by classmates based on
   - clarity
   - organization/presentation
   - novelty
   - evaluation
   - overall quality of the project

report/software: graded by the instructor/TA
   - clarity
   - organization
   - novelty
   - evaluation
   - writing quality
   - overall quality of the project

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Examples of potential projects:

1. A full scale threaded/parallel implementation of a
   UNIX utility (e.g. concurrent make, find, grep, etc). (Development)

2. Design, implement, and evaluate a threaded/MPI/distributed significant
   algorithm (e.g. graph algorithm, matrix algorithm, ML algorithm).
   (development/research)

3. Develop, implement, and evaluate a novel communication algorithm (e.g.
   intro-node broadcast) (development/research)

4. Peer-to-peer on-line gaming (development)