CSC 581A/482A Project Final Report

Instructions

Please keep the main text within 10 pages (excluding references and any appendices). At the same time, you can write less than 10 pages; it just depends on how much you have to say. For example, it could be reasonable to have a 6–8 page report instead of a 10 page report.

For your report, I encourage you to use the LaTeX style file and template below (this is just to get the geometry right, e.g. margins, font size, line spacing):

• LaTeX style file
• LaTeX template

Your project writeups are due (via Brightspace) by Monday, April 6th, 11:59pm PDT. Some students have an extended deadline due to the incentive scheme (should you be applying your extension to the project and not Problem Set 2). Please submit on time.

I know that some of you may have already written a draft of your project report. If you are confident that your writeup constitutes a good project report, then you do not have to pay as much attention to the guidelines below. Even so, please do follow the space requirement above.

Guidance for the Project Final Report

For anyone that wants guidance on how to write a good project report, please see below.

For a research-oriented project, try to structure the project report as a research paper. A good research paper:

• provides an introduction (including motivation) that describes the problem at a high level and includes some background.
• formally introduces the problem
• discusses some related work (how extensive the related work section is really depends on what problem you tackled)
• presents your approach and discusses your results (if you didn’t get so far as results or didn’t get all the results you wanted yet, you can talk about partial results, next steps, etc.)
• when presenting important choices you made (why you designed a method the way you designed it, or why you chose to run the experiments you ran, etc.), motivate these choices. Help the reader see the choices as being natural ones
• be clear about assumptions you make, and try to motivate these assumptions
• talk about future work / loose ends

For an in-depth study of a specific topic, you’ll be writing more of a survey. I mostly defer to you in how you want to write this survey, but please do cover the following key points:

• tell the reader what topic you chose, and provide some introduction of the topic
• motivate the reader about your choice of topic
• find an organized way to present your findings from the papers you looked at; try to capture (within the best of your ability) what is known about the topic so far
• have some conclusions; ideally, these take the form of proposed research which (if you continued the project) you’d be excited to work on.