CS542 Final Projects

Logistics and Due Dates

The final project presentation will be on Thursday, 13th of Dec., 2012. We will meet in our class room FL320 at 3pm (instead of 4pm). I expect that our class demonstration session will roughly last 3pm - 5:30pm. There is a different class in our space starting at 6pm - so you have to plan to not go over on your respective demonstration time. All students must attend all demonstrations by the other teams.
The associated project report (in hardcopy and online via email), and presentation overheads (in hardcopy and online) are due on that same day.

About the Presentations

We will have 11 projects presenting each with 4 team partners. Thus you must keep your project demonstration very concise. Each project will have a total time slot of 10 minutes! Ideally, all 4 members of the team have a chance to conduct a part of this presentation to demonstrate their skills.

This presentation slot includes everything, that is, setup time, presentation time, demonstration time, as well as question period. Thus, please do plan your time carefully to provide the class an insight into the most interesting aspects of your project. Also, do make sure to practice this beforehand to get your timing down, and to figure out how to bring out the highlights of your accomplishments.

Focus on the main accomplishments of your project, highlighting the key characteristics of the working system you have build, and convincing the audience of the quality and magnitude of the system you have developed via a working demonstration.

The life software demonstration is typically the most important component of your presentation, especially, if you have developed an application project. For some projects, a demonstration may not be that meaningful, possibly for some performance-oriented research projects where you should be explaining the system architecture and then show instead results and performance charts instead just giving us a demo, or for some research projects, where the ideas may be the most critical component and the methodology yet a demonstration may not give us much insight. In these later cases, please determine what most would illustrate the quality and quantity of the work that you have undertaken.

In the worst case, if your system is not working (or not working that evening a la Murphy's Law), be prepared by a-priori putting together sample screen dumps or system runs as backup to show to the class (on powerpoint). In the worst case, if your system fails on that evening but you know that it generally works, then we would schedule an alternate time slot with your team and the instructor to have a second attempt to give your system demonstration. Without a fully working system, the highest grade you could reach for the project is a B, assuming everything else is excellent.

Content of Report (and Presentation)

The written report typically is 10 to 20 pages long. Please feel free to reuse all of the written material about your project that you have been preparing before first for the project proposal and then for the project progress. However, please do make sure that any omissions or problems that had been pointed out in an earlier version, have been now been fixed. We encourage you to bring your document to the WPI writing center to receive editing help. Typically, your written report may contain the following sections:

COVER PAGE. You need to have an appropriate title, authors, an abstract, and keywords.
OVERVIEW. Clear outline of the project you tackled, and a description of your project goals. This includes a precise characterization of your application requirements, potential user group targeted, and so on.
BACKGROUND MATERIAL. Specific background material that your work is based on; this would include a description of the DBMS tools you used, such as, architecture, features, etc. A description of other systems/papers that have done similar work or approaches that you have read about before building your own solution is also useful ! Manuals you used and/or tools, and why.
YOUR SOLUTION APPROACH:
- GENERAL APPROACH you took to address problem and its justification
- DESIGN and its justification : object diagrams for system design and database design.
- IMPLEMENTATION and system details; architecture and tools.
- ISSUES: problems you encountered, special features or tools you used to achieve certain advanced capabilities.
- VALIDATION OF YOUR APPROACH: is it fully running? which part of it is not working ? what experiments and /or sample data sets have you run? how do you know your system works, i.e. what evaluations have you run?
LESSONS LEARNED. Describe your experience what you have learned (skills practiced or new tools and techniques you worked with)? Describe whether you would do this work again the same way, or if not, what you would recommend doing differently.
MEMBER CONTRIBUTION: I expect your report to include a list the tasks and amount of respective effort that each member of the team contributed re this task. This is important to have precisely and clearly stated.
CONCLUSIONS: Describe your contributions, and whether you have achieved what you set out to do. Also, list what you have NOT managed to accomplish and why.
FUTURE WORK: Give potential tasks for future research work or to make your tool into a really usable and practical system.
APPENDIX. There are no length restrictions on this appendix. Add any detailed sample data sets, diagrams, detailed background material, etc. that illustrates what you have accomplished.

Final Project Grading

Assuming a maximum of 100 pts, the following guideline will be to grade the projects:

oral project presentation and demonstration, including the quality of your overhead slides used and overall flow and content of your presentation (clear, well-organized and informative?)
demonstration of your system, in particular does your demonstration include successful example runs, set of functions shown and other means of illustrating that the system is indeed working and successfully tested.
scope of project and features accomplished (percentge to what degree is system functioning, difficulty amd ambition of chosen project scope, and has a rich array of features implemented)
written project report. Is the report well organized, easy to understand, complete, informative, well written, has citations?