Master's Project/Thesis Seminar
4005-893-70
Spring 2011
Classes: Thursdays 6-7:50pm
Room: 70-3640 (Golisano College)
http://www.cs.rit.edu/~rlaz/ms_seminar_S2011
[ Assignments ] --
[ Pre-proposals ] --
[ Readings/Resources ] --
[ Project/Thesis Web pages ] --
[ myCourses ]
Instructor
Course 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 as 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 assigned readings and projects must be completed before the start of class each week.
Sample Pre-proposals (Completed Winter 2010)
LaTeX Templates for the Pre-Proposal and Project/Thesis
-
LaTeX pre-proposal template.
- For projects, use the 'report' document class:
- For 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):
Textbook 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 following is a preliminary schedule for assigned readings:
| 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 | Using Mathematical Notation | Ch. 5
|
| 9 | Graphs and Figures | Ch. 6
|
| 10 | Final Pre-proposal Presentations |
|
Additional Resources
- Example of effective presentation slides (see also Ch. 14 of the course text, which will be discussed in Week 1):
Math Spotting (Li Yu (former MSc student), 2009)
- 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 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.
Advice on Research
Thesis/Project Web Pages
- 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 reesarch in. You will be required to have a web page with sections similar to those in the example below 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 page: Kurt Kluever's MSc Thesis Web Page
Student Web Pages:
Last updated 5/12/2011