Master's Project/Thesis Seminar (4003-893-02)
Winter 2011-2012 |
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.
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:
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).
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 should include a link to the pre-proposal, proposal, and final report/thesis. A summary of the project or abstract should also be provided.