Information for MS Thesis/Project Students

Prospective Students

• I ONLY accept students who have either taken an advanced course from me or have worked with me in some other setting such as grading. Alternatively stated, a student who would like to work with me on an MS thesis/project must first take an advanced course or two from me so that the student and I get to know one another! (It really doesn't make sense for students to work on a capstone with a faculty member whom they do not already know reasonably well!)
• To find out some of my current interests, well, take an advanced course from me!
• If I accept you (the department only requires me to accept three students) you to work on a capstone with me, you *must* be able to meet me regularly (usually once a week) in my office or work in the designated lab on campus. If you cannot do this, it would not make sense to work on a capstone with me.
• If you are in the Data Management cluster, you must have finished all the required coursework including 771 Data Exploration and Management (or under its old name, Database Systems) and for BS/MS students, 485 Database Concepts acceptable, of course; 0307-702 Statistics for Data Mining; and at least one other advanced Data Management cluster course, from me. If you haven't, well, please finish the required courses before proceeding further.
• If you are in any of the other clusters I participate in (such as Security or Distributed Systems), you should have taken the required courses in the cluster, along with an advanced course from me.
• Read the following documents:
  • What is Science?
  • What is a project/thesis?
• Email me in plain text (no attachments, no wordprocessor documents, whether in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice!), about 3 paragraphs at most. Please use an RIT email id for all correspondence.
  • Explain what CS problem you plan to solve and why it is a problem. Relate this to current work in computer science by citing papers that appear in recent ACM or IEEE journals or conferences papers; textbooks may sometimes be acceptable as additional references. If you are confused, take a look at the following:
    • Sample preproposals, proposals, and reports
    Of course, these preproposals are much longer than what you need to write at this stage, but they should help you write the couple of paragraphs described above for your email!
  • State the approach you propose to solve the stated problem (the hypothesis). Frame the problem as a scientific hypothesis.
  • State why you think your proposed approach will solve the problem, i.e., validate your hypothesis. What makes your approach better than approaches used in current research? Again, you need to cite some papers.
  Please schedule an appointment with me only after you have emailed me as stated above.

Some Requirements

• Adequate Progress: The graduate catalog states that committee members agree to serve on your committee for one year from project registration, and after one year they can resign from the committee if they feel the student is not making adequate progress. I define adequate progress as students providing me with regular (once in 2 weeks) updates on your status, preferably via periodic appointments in my office on campus, or occasionally via emails that include links to updated status reports. Either way, updated status reports must be posted on your MS capstone webpage. Adequate progress must be shown both before (when there is no commitment on the part of the committee) and after (when there is a 1-year commitment from the committee) the proposal is registered.
• Required use of LaTeX for all capstone documents: Starting Fall 20081, students must use LaTeX for preproposals, proposals, and final capstone reports. Sample LaTeX templates are available for preproposals, proposals and reports as shown below. You can find excellent tutorials on how to use LaTeX on the web, and free installations of LaTeX may be downloaded for Windows, MacOSX, and Linux. The CS department also has LaTeX available on the Solaris machines. Documents written using other word-processing software such as MS Word or OpenOffice.org will not be accepted.

Document Templates

• Writing an MS Project/Thesis Preproposal
  Examples of preproposals written in LaTeX are provided in the following directory. Please read the README.txt file first, and then follow the directions shown there.
  • Template and Sample Files
• Writing an MS Project/Thesis Proposal
  • Template and Sample Files
  The link above shows the template for a typical MS project/thesis proposal in LaTeX; the PDF file is provided to show you the end result of compiling the LaTeX template.
  The proposal should be an expansion of your preproposal, and should contain additional and more detailed material. Of course, make sure your proposal meets requirements of a capstone proposed specified in the CS Graduate Handbook.
• Writing an MS Project/Thesis Report
  • MS Project: Template (PDF)
  • MS Thesis: Outline (PDF)
  The links above show layouts of a typical MS project/thesis report that is required. While some minor changes may be acceptable, most major changes are not. Of course, if your topic is substantially different, check with me before you get too far down the design and implementation of your work.
  A zip file of a complete downloadable LaTeX template with associated style files is available at:
  • RIT CS LaTeX Report Template
  Please use Thesis.tex for a thesis or Report.tex for a report as the starting point for your work, and edit it as needed.
• A couple of excellent examples of preproposals, proposals, and reports are shown in the following directory:
  • Sample preproposals, proposals, and reports

General Writing Issues

• Fix them yourself.
• Get help from RIT's Academic Support Center (2309 Eastman, 5-6682).
• Get help from the resources provided by Wallace Library.
• Get competent friends to help.
• Pay the moolah to hire a real English editor to proofread and correct your English.

Revised June 2010