4005-764 Research Paper Requirements

Last Updated: 2013/03/01 18:04:44

The following paragraphs describe the requirements for the paper.

Due Dates.

There are three due dates associated with this assignment:

These dates have been selected to give you enough time (four or more weeks) to research your topic adequately, and to then prepare your report (at least three additional weeks). Of course, these are deadlines; you are always free to select your topic and submit your report earlier in the quarter.

Topic.

Your report should be a survey of the state-of-the-art in some area of shader-based image synthesis, or an in-depth report on a technique not presented in class. The intent of this assignment is to help prepare you for a possible project or thesis in Computer Graphics.

While you must register your topic with me by Wednesday, March 27, 2012 , I urge you to meet with me individually during the first few weeks of the course to discuss possible topics that match your interests. Register your topic by submitting a title, a short abstract, and an initial bibliography. The bibliography should include at least the articles you have read which raised your interest in this topic.

Once your topic has been approved, you have some additional time to collect the papers you will be using. This list of papers must be sent to me by Wednesday, April 10, 2013 ; it should list all materials you intend to use for your report, including both papers from journals and conferences and chapters from textbooks. Provide enough information that I will be able to identify and (if I need to) locate your references, but please do not send copies of these items.

For each of these submissions, you must send email to my CS account (wrc at cs.rit.edu) in plain text form - please do not send me binary files (.doc, .docx, .pdf, etc.) for either submission!

If you find that you are having difficulty locating materials, please request help from Roman Koshykar (475-2238, 1420 Wallace Library [building 05], roman.koshykar@rit.edu). Roman is the GCCIS reference librarian, and will be able to help you locate resources.

Grading.

It is assumed that the report you submit is your work alone, and does not represent in whole or in part the work of any other person or persons. If you feel the need to include portions of a textbook or article in your report, remember to attribute them properly (footnotes or endnotes are helpful here). Failure to properly attribute material which is taken from other sources is plagiarism, and will be dealt with as such. (My efforts to detect plagiarism will include submission of reports to turnitin.com after personally-identifying information - e.g., student names - has been removed from the report, in accordance with RIT policy.)

My evaluation of papers must be, to some extent, subjective. However, there are certain eternal verities.

You will receive a letter grade (using an A+ through F scale) for your report. Because of the importance of clarity in the presentation of information, approximately 40% of your grade will be based on how you wrote your report, with the remaining 60% based on what you wrote.

When determining the style component of your grade, I will consider (among other things) your spelling, punctuation, and grammar, as well as the overall readability of the report. (To forestall the inevitable question, yes, I do know that this isn't an English class. The ability to express yourself clearly in written works, however, is of critical importance in today's world regardless of your chosen profession, hence its inclusion as part of your grade on this assignment.)

Your grade will be, for the most part, based on the text you have written. Quotations from resources will be judged on their relevance, but the bulk of the grade will come from your own words. Avoid over-use of quotations; reports which are more quoted text than original text don't provide much material to base a good grade on, so be sure that your quotations are short and relevant.

Deliverables.

The electronic submission of your deliverables will include the following:

I will print a copy of your report from the PDF version you submitted and return it to you with my comments.

Your report should have a cover page stating the title of the report, your name, the course name, the quarter, my name, and the due date. The cover page is the only page which should contain your name; do not put your name anywhere else in the text, or in the headers and/or footers you put on each page, etc.

Turn in electronic references (e.g., PDFs of articles) with your report. If you have reference in paper form (rather than electronic), turn them in at class time on the class date that is closest to the due date. If you submit paper copies, I will assume that they should be recycled; if you wish to have them returned to you, attach a note to them requesting that they be returned.

If it is difficult or impossible for you to produce a PDF version of your report, see me before you submit your work. Supporting files you submit (images, text copies of papers, etc.) can be any format.

Do not submit files whose names contain whitespace characters (spaces, tabs, etc). The commands 'try' uses to archive your submission do not work properly on files whose names contain these characters. If you need to submit such a file, rename it (e.g., rename "This is a file.pdf" to "This_is_a_file.pdf" or something similar) before submitting, or that file will not be saved in the submission archive.

Electronic submissions are to be made with the command 

try  wrc-grd  shading-paper  files

where files is the list of files you are submitting. Once you have submitted your work, you may wish to verify that all the files were saved; this can be done with the command 

try -q  wrc-grd  shading-paper

This will produce a list of the files which were archived from your submission. If some of the files you believe you submitted aren't listed, make sure that their names don't contain whitespace characters (see above).

Guidelines.

The following guidelines are presented for two reasons: to help guide you in determining how to write your papers, and to help simplify the grading process. In particular, the format restrictions mentioned below are intended to make it easier for me to read your papers (for grading purposes) while not making the papers harder for you to write; as such, I will expect you to abide by them. In most cases, the restrictions are similar to the standards of many professional publications in this field.

  1. Quantity. The report should be long enough to say what needs to be said and short enough to be comprehensible in my lifetime while giving reasonable coverage of the topic. It is hard to say anything of real substance in less than 10-15 pages; rarely, though, should a report for this assignment require more than 20 pages.

  2. Quality. At a minimum, each paper should have a cover page, the text itself, and a bibliography. You need not provide a table of contents, although one would certainly be appropriate if you choose to organize the paper into sections and subsections. You may use either footnotes or endnotes, although footnotes are preferable.

    The question of coverage of broad topic areas typically arises. In general, a paper which covers fewer major ideas but goes into each idea in more detail is better than a paper which attempts to touch on every idea in an area but doesn't get into any idea in depth.

  3. Format. Each paper must be typewritten or printed on 8.5" x 11" paper. The cover page should state the title of the paper, your name, the course name, the quarter, my name, and the due date. Pages must be double-spaced (not single or triple spaced!), and must have margins of one inch on all sides. Pages (other than the cover page) should be numbered.

    If you use a text formatter or word processor to prepare your report, please select your fonts and point sizes intelligently. Many word processors will quite happily let you select fonts and point sizes which make your text utterly unreadable. I recommend using 11-point type (anything smaller is hard to read, and anything larger wastes space and artificially inflates the page count), and using Times or Palatino as the proportional font and Courier as the fixed-pitch font (if needed). Please avoid using sans-serif fonts (especially Helvetica).

  4. Bibliography. The bibliography often gives people problems. Minimally, a bibliography entry for a book should include the author(s), the title, the publisher, and the year of publication. When including a reference to a journal or magazine article, the volume and/or issue number should also be included.

    Our library has a number of excellent online references which cover this. I recommend the Modern Language Association (MLA) citation format; the library has a nice MLA Citation Format (PDF) summary document, which covers both bibliography entries and in-text citations.