If you are taking this course for 4 credits you need to send Chengkai Li a proposal of your project

The project outline should be in sufficient detail that I comment on it and we can then revise your intended work plan. You can think of this in terms of a mini-funding proposal - you need to describe what you intend to do at each stage and how each stage will build on from the previous one.

The project should be centered around databases and should interesting, challenging and worthwhile. Worthwhile can be used in a general sense i.e. significantly extends your knowledge/know how/expertise of database use, design or implementation, or benefits the world in a significant manner. Ideally the project will have a research and implementation aspects.

In case you need something more concrete to work from, here's a rough outline (you do not need to stick rigidly to this format):

Graduate Project Stage 0 by BLAH@uiuc.edu:

BLAH CS411 Graduate Individual Project - "BLAH ENGINE"

 This project is about BLAH...
 I will research BLAH and intend to implement BLAH.
 The research part of this project will ask the questions BLAH, and in
 particular I will look existing solutions to these kinds of BLAH problems.
(Your proposal should include the details of what you intend to do)
 
 The next stage of this project will be to report on my research findings and translate these into a proposed implementation plan. This will be my deliverable for stage 1.
(Your proposal should include the details of what you intend to do)

 In stage 2, I will BLAH
(Your proposal should include the details of what you intend to do)

 In stage 3, I intend to BLAH, though depending on whether BLAH in stage 1 or stage 2 I may also/instead BLAH. At the end of stage 3 I will deliver BLAH - an initial protoype or report on.. or preliminary working version of ...

 In the final stage, I will complete the implementation and review my project. I will judge the success of the project based on the following criteria and suggest future extensions based on the results of my work.

 The major challenges of this project will be BLAH.
 The major benefits (for me/...) will be BLAH.