CS511 Advanced Database Management Systems (Fall 2006)

Instructor: ChengXiang Zhai
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Course Project

Project presentation schedule

If you haven't yet formed a team, you need to visit the Class Wiki as soon as possible to sign up for a project

The project proposal is due Oct 25, Wednesday. Click here to see more information about this.

Introduction

The course project is to give you hands-on experience on doing research on some data/information management problem of your choice. You will be grouped in teams to work on a small research topic and write a report about it. A comprehensive survey of related/existing work on the topic must be included in the report. You will also need to make a presentation of your project to the class.

General steps

1. Pick a topic

You can either pick from a list of suggested topics, which is available in the class Class Wiki, or choose your own topic. When picking a topic, try to ask yourself the following questions:

Is the topic addressing an important problem (or an important need, in the case of building an application) ? Would any one care about it, if you solve the problem, or build the application?
Do you have any idea at all about how to solve the problem, or build the application? If not, can you reformulate the problem to make it easier?

A good topic is one that you like to work on, one that people care about, that you have some idea about it, and that is small enough for you to finish by the end of the semester.

2. Form a team

You are required to work with other students as a team. This not only would give your some experience on working with others, but also would allow you to work on a larger (presumably more interesting) topic. Online students will be paired with local students so that each team will have at least one local student to present the project. The team size is expected to be between 2-4 members. You can use the class mailing list, newsgroup, and the Wiki space to communicate with each other to form teams.

3. Read related work

Once you have chosen a topic, you will need to read some papers to know about what people have already done on the topic, so that you can be sure your idea extends , rather than duplicates, the existing work, if any.

4. Write a proposal

You are required to write a one-page project proposal and post it in the class Wiki space before Oct. 25, 2006. Please include the names of the team members. Here's some guideline on how to write the proposal.

If your project involves original research, your proposal should state explicitly all the following:

What is your research question? Clearly define the research problem/question.
Why is this an interesting question to ask and why would we care about the answer to this question or a solution to the problem?
Has any existing research work tried to answer the same or a similar question, and if so, what is still unknown?
How do you plan to work out the answer to the question. (At the porposal stage, you are only expected to have a sketch of your methods .)
How would you evaluate your solution. That is, how do you plan to demonstrate that your solution/answer is good or is reasonable.
A rough timeline to show when you expect to finish what. List a couple of milestones.

If your project is to build a software tool, then your proposal should state explicitly all the following:

What is exactly the function of your tool? That is, what will it do?
Why would we need such a tool and who would you expect to use it?
Have people already built such a tool or a similar tool, and if so, how yours is different from or better than other tools. Do we already know how to build such a tool? What is the challenge?
How do you plan to build it?
How will you demonstrate the usefulness of your tool?
A rough timeline to show when you expect to finish what. List a couple of milestones.

VERY IMPORTANT: Please estimate the amount of work you propose to do and make sure that you can actually finish the project by the end of this semester. It is okay to propose an ambitious project, but you will need to specify clearly what you are commited to actually complete for the course project.

Your proposal will be graded as a preliminary version of your project report, and it will contribute 5% (out of the 25% for the project report) toward your final grade. That is, the final version of your project report will account for 20% of your final grade.

5. Work on the project

You should reuse any existing tools as much as possible. See the resources page for some useful pointers.

Discuss any problems or issues with your teamates. Discuss them with other students and the instructor.

Consider documenting your work regularly. This way, you will already have a lot of things written down by the end of the semester.

6. Present your project

At the end of the semester, each team is required to make a powerpoint presentation to the class. For a team with more than one person, it is up to the team to decide how you would like to run the presentation. You may have one person to present the whole project or have multiple people to present project.

You should think of this as if it were a conference talk. In general, you will need to define and motivate the problem, describe your method(s), discuss the results, make conclusions, and discuss how the work can be further improved (i.e., future directions). Think very clearly about the key message you want to convey, and see how you can best use the given time slot to effectively convey the message to people.

Each project will have 25 minutes for the entire presentation. You should plan to finish your talk within 20 minutes to leave enough time for questions and feedback from the audience. The following is a list of the elements you should include in your presentation, along with a suggested breakdown of the time. These are meant to be guidelines, though; you should make adjustment according to the actual contents of your presentation.

[3 min] Concise introduction to the problem you work on
[2 min] Briefly describe the main idea of your project (expected contribution of your project)
[9 min] Briefly explain the technical challenges that you needed to solve and how you solved them.
[5 min] Briefly discuss any experiment results or sample system output.
[1 min] Mention some future work.

Each presentation will be graded mainly based on three factors: (1) clarity of the presentation; (2) the effectiveness of using time; (3) how well you answer questions. In general, all the students in a project group will get the same grade for the project presentation unless your individual progress report and the project report together cannot provide sufficient evidence that you have made substantial contributions to the project, in which case you may get a lower grade than your teammates.

7. Write a project report (due Dec 13, 2006, Wednesday, 11:59pm, CST)

You should write your report as if you were writing a short conference paper. You can think of it as an expanded written description of your presentation. Thus the same general guideline applies, i.e., you should (1) explain your problem clearly; (2) provide sufficient motivation for your work and explain how your work is connected with the existing/previous work; (3) explain your methods with sufficient details; (4) discuss the research/development results; (5) summarize your work, draw conclusions if possible, and discuss how you think the work can be further improved/extended. There is no strict length requirement. You may target at anywhere between 6 pages (font 10, single column) and 10 pages (font 11, single column) without counting any necessary appendices. Actually, given the same amount of essential information, the shorter the better; of course, you will have to judge what counts as "essential information". A good report is not just a straightforward description of what you did (Such a paper would probably never be accepted by a good conference); it should demonstrate your contributions very clearly and convincingly. Thus it is important that you think very clearly about what are the major points you want to make and include arguments and empirical evidence that support your points. For example, whenever you make a choice of some method or design an algorithm in a particular way, always justify it, at least, try to explain why you have made this choice. Also, you may want to summarize or plot your experiment results in one way rather than some other ways, because this "particular way" would support/illustrate your point better. Always keep in mind what exactly you want your readers to learn from your report, including both positive and negtive findings.

The project report should be sent to the instructor by email (czhai AT cs DOT uiuc DOT edu), and is due on Dec, 13, 2007, Wednesday, 11:59pm, CST.

The project report will be graded based on how much you have done for your project and how well you address the questions listed above. In general, all the students of a team will get the same grade for the project, unless there is evidence that some team member has not done his/her assigned task for the project, in which case the grade for that student will be discounted. So every team member should work hard to help finish what has been proposed in the project proposal as well as help write the report.