MS Project / Thesis Seminar (4005-893-70)

Course Information

Instructor: Reynold Bailey
Email: rjb@cs.rit.edu
Phone: (585) 475-6181

Office hours: Monday, Wednesday, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM, Room GOL-3517
                         
Class times: Monday, 6:00 PM - 7:50 PM, Room GOL-3540

Course URL: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~rjb/MS_Seminar_20111.htm

Description

The goal of this course is for students to become acquainted with the skills and practices needed for carrying out research and development projects in Computer Science, and to create a preliminary plan for completing their own MS project or thesis. Relevant skills include performing targeted literature searches, writing technical documents (papers, project reports and theses), and designing programs (projects) or experiments and/or proofs (theses). Over the course of the quarter, students will find a faculty advisor who will oversee the completion of their MS thesis or project, and work with the advisor, the course instructor, and other students in the course to develop a preliminary research project or thesis proposal, known as a 'pre-proposal.'

Ideally, a pre-proposal briefly identifies the following in 1-2 pages:

• A research problem or task (for theses, including a hypothesis)
   
• A strategy/approach for devising a solution
   
• Key references (3-5) on current work related to the project/thesis
   
• Sketch of the implementation strategy (projects), or experiment/proof strategy (theses)
   
• Resources needed (e.g. experimental data and tools to be used)
   
• Metrics and/or protocols (e.g. for human experiments) that will be used to assess the success of the project or thesis. For theses, these measures should be designed to test the hypothesis.

Developing a pre-proposal requires a great deal of effort, and is ideally completed while having weekly meetings with the faculty advisor. Each week students will discuss an assigned reading out of the course text, and make a brief (3-4 minute) presentation and/or submit a pre-proposal draft.

Course Policies

The following are required in order to pass the MS seminar:

• Attendance is mandatory - students must attend the seminar until their thesis/project pre-proposal has been approved by the instructor and the student's advisor, and the pre-proposal has been presented in the seminar.
   
• All readings and assignments must be completed before the start of class each week.

Sample Pre-Proposals

• Enhance Interactive Subsurface Scattering Toward Off-line Quality (Chih-Chun Lin)
   
• Profiling of malicious web application users (Kyle Marcotte)
   
• A Framework for Evolutionary Clustering on Multi-type Relational Data (Amit Salunke)
   
• Indoor versus Outdoor Scene Classification (Preethi Vantaram)

LaTex Templates for Pre-Proposal and Project/Thesis

• LaTeX pre-proposal template
   
• For projects, use the 'report' document class:
  • Notes on creating a technical report using LaTeX
  • Many more examples of creating technical reports using LaTeX may be found online.
     
• For theses, you may use this RIT Computer Science MSc. Thesis Template (courtesy Amit Pillay)
  • Sample thesis - Sean Janis
  • Sample thesis - John Hawley
     
• GUI LaTeX Environments:
  • TeXShop (MacOS)
  • MikTeX (Windows)
  • TeX Live (Ubtunu Linux: many similar packages available for other Linux Distributions)
     
• Some BibTeX tools (for collecting references, and annotating them):
  • BibDesk (MacOS)
  • Pybliographer (Linux/Unix: command-line version for Windows)

Textbook, Readings, and Assignments

Zobel, Justin. Writing for Computer Science, 2nd edition. London: Springer-Verlag, 2004 (available online through booksellers, and in the RIT bookstore).

The following is a preliminary schedule for readings and assignments.

All readings and assignments must be completed before the start of class each week.  Assignments will be posted weekly in the table below.

Additional Resources

• Archive of RIT MSc. Theses in Computer Science (RIT Digital Media Library)
   
• Writing the Doctoral Dissertation by Gordon Davis and Clyde Parker. This is a short reference on the thesis process, including the planning and completion of a thesis (whether Ph.D. or Masters). The book includes material on drafting possible thesis/project topic proposals that is particularly useful.
   
• The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition by Strunk and White. An excellent, short, and cheap reference on writing clearly and concisely.

• Notes on Academic Writing for Computer Science by Prof. Richard Zanibbi
   
• Advice on Research and Writing
   
• How to Read, Write, Present Papers
   
• Writing Technical Articles
   
• Useful Things to Know About Ph.D. Thesis Research

Thesis / Project Webpage

You should set up a web page for your project/thesis this quarter. To start, you can simply set up the appropriate headings, and summarize the problems/area that you intend to pursue research in. You will be required to have a web page prior to your project/thesis defense.

Note: normally this web page is hosted in the web page provided with your CS computer account, in ~/public_html

Example project/thesis web pages:

• Rohit Srinath
• Anoop Thomas
• Kurt Kluever
• Sean Janis
• Other examples: See Prof. Zanibbi's 2001 MS Seminar page

Acknowledgements

The material presented in this course was largely developed by Prof. Richard Zanibbi. Course material was also provided by Prof Minseok Kwon, Prof. Hans-Peter Bischof, and other members of the CS faculty at RIT.