Multimedia Computing Project 3

U-Pick - Design Your Own Project

Proposal due date: March 28th (in class)

Project due date: April 18th (report in class, code online)

Prentation date: April 18th (in class)


Index


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 multimedia programs and systems. Whatever you choose, your projects will require an evaluation and a report of what you did and what the evaluation produced, 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 (e.g., multimedia repair) with details on what aspect is of interest and will form the basis of hypotheses.
  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 moderate to 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 (through experiments) 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 seen thus far in class, including:

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. Or 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 (e.g., 25 minutes) will be provided a week before the presentation date and must be strictly followed. You should plan on talking for less than the time alloted (e.g., 22 minutes) to 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:

There are many more possibilities. You contact me with an idea before fleshing it out into a proposal.

For your presentation, some general guidelines:

A talk structure you might follow:

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

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


Hand In

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

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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