Master's Project/Thesis Seminar (4003-893-02)

Winter 2011-2012
Classes: Thursdays 4-6:50pm
Room: GOL-1445 (Golisano College)
http://www.cs.rit.edu/~rlaz/ms_seminarW2011_2012


[ Pre-proposals ] -- [ Examples ] -- [ Schedule ] -- [ Assignments ] -- [ myCourses ]

Instructor: Richard Zanibbi, Email: rlaz@cs.rit.edu, Phone: (585) 475-5023
Office: GOL-3551 (Golisano College), Office hours: Tues. and Thurs. 10am-noon or by appointment


Assignments, Deadlines, etc.

Course Description

The goals for this course are for students to develop research skills for Computer Science, and to create a plan for completing their own MS project or thesis. Over the course of the quarter, students will work with their faculty advisor, the course instructor, and other students in the course to develop a preliminary research project or thesis proposal, known as a pre-proposal. Students will also set up a web page summarizing information on their project/thesis that will be provided as part of the announcement for their thesis/project defense. Each week students will discuss an assigned reading out of the course text, and either make a brief presentation or submit a pre-proposal draft or written assignment.

Students may find examples of previous projects and theses online, through recent student project and thesis web pages, and in the Archive of RIT MSc Theses in Computer Science (RIT Digital Media Library). Example theses and project reports are also provided below.


Pre-Proposals

By their nature, research projects involve uncertainty. A pre-proposal is a tool for working through the requirements, key elements, and scope for your project or thesis, to try and reduce uncertainty and help you finish in a timely fashion. You will refine a number of versions of your pre-proposal over the quarter.

A pre-proposal briefly identifies the following in no more than 2 pages:

  1. A research problem or task, including a hypothesis (testable assertion) for theses. This needs to include key references (3-5) on current work related to the project/thesis, which establish the context and foundation for the proposed project.
  2. The intended approach (i.e. methodology) to be used in devising a solution. For a project, this may detail the libraries and/or tools to be used, and the high-level architecture of the system. For theses, this also commonly involves algorithm(s) to be modified or developed.
  3. The means by which the outcome of the research project will be evaluated. For projects, what are the inputs and outputs for the system, and how will quality be measured (e.g. correctness, integration, time, space)? For theses, the evaluation will be an experiment (empirical) or proofs (theoretical) comparing existing and devised solutions, with the ultimate goal of testing the hypothesis.
  4. An analysis of the potential outcomes: under what evaluation outcomes are the project aims achieved, or the hypothesis confirmed or rejected? Under what conditions might other things be observed and/or learnt?
A LaTeX pre-proposal template is available
here. Note that the headings are to identify key aspects of the proposal, and are not required for the final pre-proposal submission.

Thesis/Project Web Pages

You will set up a web page for your project/thesis. To start, you can provide appropriate headings, and summarize the problems/area that you intend to pursue research in. Examples are provided below. Note: this web page should be located within your CS computer account web page, in ~/public_html on the CS computing system).

Schedule and Readings

The course textbook is:
Zobel, Justin. Writing for Computer Science, 2nd edition. London: Springer-Verlag, 2004 (available online through booksellers, and in the RIT bookstore).
The table below gives a preliminary schedule for assigned readings. Information and advice regarding reading and writing for Computer Science research are provided below.

Week Topics Pages
2 Research Literature, Planning 157-169
3 Hypotheses, Research Areas 169-182
4 Experimentation 185-197
5 Experimentation Part II (remainder of Ch. 11)
6 Writing research papers/documents Ch. 9 (137-155)
7 Defining and Describing Algorithms Ch. 7
8 Graphs and Figures Ch. 6
9 Mathematical Notation Ch. 5
10 Final Pre-proposal Presentations

Most weeks, the instructor will also require either a short presentation, written assignment, or pre-proposal draft to be prepared (this will be provided on the Assignments web page).

During the quarter, we will be completing two peer review exercises, planned for weeks 6 and 9. In these classes, students will exchange their proposals and provide feedback to one another using a reviewing form and through discussion.

Note: The instructor will be away Week 8 (January 26th, 2012). Any assignment will be posted on the course web page, and students may choose to meet in class to help one another with preparing their proposal documents and presentations. This will be discussed in-class in Week 7 (January 19th).


Grading

At the end of the quarter, a letter grade will be assigned by the instructor based on the following deliverables.

Pre-proposal (2 pages)
Final Pre-proposal Presentation (5 minutes)
Project Web Page
Weekly Presentations/Assignments (6-8)
MSc Defense or Research Talk Summary (2 pages)

Both written assignments and presentations will be short (e.g. 2 pages for assignments, or 3-5 minutes for presentations). For this course, our emphasis is on developing a solid research project proposal, and clearly and efficiently communicating key techniques and concepts to a graduate-level Computer Science audience. A related skill is identifying which aspects of a research project should be mentioned in a presentation or document, when to use citations to establish context (i.e. indicate sources of additional information), and what may be omitted.

The pre-proposal is complete when the student's advisor emails the instructor to indicate that the pre-proposal is acceptable.

Master's defense announcements are regularly mailed out to the grads@cs.rit.edu email list. Below is a list of talk series where students may find a research talk of interest:


Project/Thesis Web Pages for Students in the Course (Winter 2011-2012)

Sample Pre-proposals and Web Pages

Project/Thesis web pages should include a link to the pre-proposal, proposal, and final report/thesis. A summary of the project or abstract should also be provided.


LaTeX Templates and Samples for Projects and Theses

  • Projects: Prof. Raj has provided a template of LaTeX files for CS Projects available here. This file also contains a LaTeX template for MS Theses as well (another is provided below).
    • Sample projects (Note: while these reports do not provide one, a table of contents is recommended).
  • Theses: you may use this RIT Computer Science MSc Thesis Template (courtesy Amit Pillay)
  • 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):

    Advice on Reading, Writing, and Research

    Additional Resources

    • Example of effective presentation slides (see also Ch. 14 of the course text): Math Spotting (Li Yu (former MSc student), 2009)
    • 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 PhD or Master's). 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.

    Last updated 11/26/2011