Multimedia Computing Project 3

Proposal due date: November 11th (in class)

Project due date: December 2nd (in class)

Prentation date: December 2nd (in class)

Index

• Overview
• Details
• Hints
• Hand In

Overview

You are to design, implement and evaluate a project of your choosing. The emphasis of the project can vary, from implementation of new code, to modification of existing code, to incorporation of other code, to measurement of existing programs. Whatever you choose, your projects will require a report and an evaluation, in addition to any code you develop. Lastly, you will do a formal, polished, presentation of your project in class on the day it is due.

These projects can be done in groups.

Details

Proposal

You will submit a proposal to me roughly 3 weeks before your project is due. In the proposal, you will outline the work that will constitute your project. It should include:

1. An overview of the area your project is in.
2. A brief description of any major implementation tasks, tools to learn, systems to setup, etc.
3. A timeline for expected completion of major tasks.
4. A grading guide of where points should be allocated for your project based on amount of effort it will require (you will submit a revised version of this with your final report). Note, your presentation will be 10% of your project grade.
5. A summary of what you hope to learn.

Your proposal should be about 1-2 pages in length.

Project

The work itself can involve a wide variety of possibilities, including:

1. A large programming effort from scratch, such as you did already in your projects 1 and 2
2. Modifications to an existing program, such as enhancements to your projects 1 and 2
3. Running and evaluating existing multimedia technologies, such as toolkits or commercial products
4. Extensive evaluations of previous projects, such as more detailed studies along the lines of project 1b and project 2b
5. A combination of any of the above, to a lesser extent

Any project should, of course, relate to topics relevant to the class.

Report

No matter what the implementation effort of your project, you must include a report. The focus of the report may vary, somewhat, but it will contain elements common to the evaluation summaries we have seen thus far in class, including:

• Introduction, indicating motivation, problem statement and hypotheses.
• Background, providing any details needed to understand your work.
• Design of experiments, providing details on measurement methods and independent variables chosen.
• Results and analyses.
• Conclusions, including what can be drawn from your analysis compared to your hypotheses. For this project, you should include a brief description of what you learned above and beyond the scientific conclusions.
• An abstract, summarizing your report in 1 paragraph (you will write this last, but it should go first in the report).
• A grading guide of where points should be allocated for your project based on amount of effort it will require (an updated version of what appeared in your proposal). Note, your presentation will remain 10% of your project grade.

Presentation

The last component of your project will be an in-class presentation. This is intended to be a professional, well-organized presentation showing all aspects of your project. Your talk should introduce the idea, motivate the problem, provide relevant related work as appropriate, describe your approach, show your results and summarize conclusions and take-away points. You should have visual aids (e.g. slides), create a well-rehearsed script of what you will say, practice, stay on time, and leave some time for a few questions at the end. You are encouraged to narrate code samples, show a video or other relevant materials, or even demonstrate working code.

You can, if you wish, bring a laptop to class with your presentation materials already preloaded and you can then hook your machine into the projector. wOr you can bring your materials on a USB key for installation on the podium computer. In the latter case, if you have videos or other visual aids, be sure to include them on the USB or embedd them in your presentation so they transfer appropriately.

The total time for each presentation is 15 minutes (strict). Thus, you should plan on talking for no more than 12 minutes. This will leave a bit of time for a transition and for a few questions. Expect some questions - you will get them!

Hints

There are many possible projects that are suitable. If in doubt, you can run ideas by me briefly via email before starting work on the proposal.

This project is not intended to be an extra large project. Roughly, it should be the same size in effort as your other projects (1 or 2). The project is worth as many points as project 1 + project 1b (or project 2 plus project 2b), but the extra time and effort is spent in the design of your project (which you need to do, rather than having me do it for you). So, don't bite off more than you can chew. Especially remember to allocate appropriate time and effort to any new technology you incorporate into your project that you need to learn. Note, group projects are expected to be larger than solo projects. Roughly, a project done by a group of 2 people should be 1.5 times as large as a project done by 1 person.

Here is a list of some example topics for projects:

• Enhancements to your Speak:

  • Support multiple users in "party-call" using either unicast or multicast (or both)
  • Implementation of repair techniques (FEC, interleaving, selective retransmission, error concealment)
  • Implementation of buffering (QM or other)

• Empirical measurements of the system, the network or the quality of commercial streaming media. See the Video Tracer work for examples.

• Mini RLM - text-based video over receiver driven layered multicast.

• Nutella - a P2P streaming movie system.

• Enhancement or evaluation of multimedia networking research in NS. This can include simulated streaming media protocols, such as TFRC or RAP, router queue management techniques such as ABE, or multicast work such (probably only an advanced implementation in this area if you have prior NS experience).

For your presentation, some general guidelines:

• Expect to spend about 1.5-2 minutes per slide on average. However, some people go through faster or slower, so see the next point.
• Time yourself. Try it out loud. You can think much faster than you can talk. It doesn't take long to practice one talk - you can do about 3 in an hour - and it will make a big difference.
• Have one major message per slide. Don't combine intuition, motivation problem and solution all in one.
• Be consistent with the title of the slide. If it is "Motivation" do not say how your method works. If it is "My algorithm" do not summarize for the first time other people's work.
• Think of your talk as an advertisement. You do not have time to go into all the details of what you did. However, give the flavor or highlight the difficulties involved.
• Start from high level and then go into detail. Tell people exactly what you are trying to say.
• Know your audience - the level of the class is similar to your own, graduate level CS students with some experience in multimedia. They may not know details on your specific problem, tho.
• If you add humor or personal comments, that can be fine, but avoid making a comments that insult the audience or put down your own work.
• Have fun! If you enjoy your work, and you enjoy your presentation, it is likely the audience will, too.

A talk structure you might follow:

• Title: 1 slide
• What is the problem: 1 slide
• Motivation/Importance: 1 slide
• What is the solution/contribution: 1 slide
• Background/Definitions/Previous Work: 1 slide
• Your approach/work/innovation/implementation: 1-3 slides
• Experiment design: 1 slide
• Results: 1-3 slides
• Conclusions and Future work: 1 slide

Note, the above may well have too many slides! Again, make sure you make slides and practice to get your talk down to 12 minutes.

You might see my slides on "How to Give a Talk" (ppt, pdf).

Hand In

You must turn in appropriate material so your project can be evaluated:

• A hard-copy of your report (see above). This is due in class.

• All source code used or developed in your project, including header files. Please include a Makefile, too, for building your code.

• A README file with any special instructions or platform requirements for running your application. Provide some examples, even, if that would help.

You will use email to turn in your files. When ready, create a directory of your project based on your last name (i.e. claypool) and tar up (with gzip or winzip) your files, for example:

    mkdir claypool
    cp * claypool  // copy all your files to submit to the claypool dir
    tar czvf claypool.tgz claypool

then attach claypool.tgz to an email with "cs529-proj3" as the subject.

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Send all questions to the Mark Claypool.