CS6234: Advanced Algorithms
School of Computing, National University of Singapore
(Spring Sememster 2009)

Course Project (50%) (Draft)

1. About Your Project

Students are expected to work on a research project for the duration of this course, and produce a poster presentation, project writeup, and a demo (if applicable) at the end of the course. For your research project, you can do one of the following:

Your Project Choices: to come later...

2. The Details

(a) Design and Implementation of Algorithms for Your Problem

In this project, you are expected to choose an interesting algorithmic problem and design and implement your own new, novel algorithmic solution(s) and perform a comparative evaluation of your algorithm against existing solutions for the problem. (You will need to do a quick survey of existing solutions.) Your solution do not have to be better than other existing solutions (but that would be nice), but it should be comparable in performance.

(b) Survey of the State of the Art of an Algorithmic Problem

In this project, you are expected to choose an interesting algorithmic problem and do a survey of some (at least 3-5) state of the art algorithmic solution to the problem. Implement (or otherwise obtain source codes from the authors) some of these solutions, compare them, and provide new insights to why some solution(s) is better than others. Provide public-domain software for letting others share and use your work.

3. Delivarables for your Project and Submission

Project Write-up: For both (a) and (b), you will need to do a project writeup, which may take the form of a research paper intended for a conference or journal submission (strongly encouraged, 10 page limit) or a technical report, limited to thirty (30) pages, excluding preface, appendices and bibliography. Conference papers are generally much shorter but take a lot of time to prepare. Selected final projects will be asked to submit their work to the relevant conference or journal.

Project Software and Documents: For (a), your deliverables should also include a project demo (if appropriate), the source code, object code, the datasets, the results of your runs, and soft copies of relevant reference papers.

For (b), your deliverables should also include the 30 minute presentation slides of your survey paper, source codes and datasets for the comparative evaluation, if applicable, and soft copies of relevant reference papers.

Poster Presentation: At the end of the semester, we will have a poster presentation (with demos, as appropriate) of all student projects. If you are not presenting in a session, walk around the class and learn about your peers' projects. You will be asked to assess their projects and turn your assessments in.
(Due to heavy workload, the poster presentation has been cancelled! However, if you *have* prepared a poster )

[NEW!! Project Review] Instead of the poster session, Panos and I will email you to arrange a short time to review your project with you sometime late next week.

Submission of Final Deliverables:
Please turn in a hard copy of your report to me. I will leave a "box" outside my office (COM1-03-41).

As for soft copy, please put all the deliverables for your project (as specified above) in one folder/directory (with suitable sub-folders) and zip it up into a file called CS6234-Proj-[your-name>].zip and submit it to the workbin called "CS6234 Project Submission".

4. Deadlines

Milestone M1: Proposal of Your Project Topic (Due: 04-Feb-2009, Week 4)

You need to write a short (1-2 page) proposal for your chosen topic. Your writeup should include the specific algorithmic problem you propose to solve/survey (together with associated references), your proposed research plan, and, if relevant, how it is related to your research area. If you have chosen (b). you should also write about the algorithmic approach(es) you would like to adopt for this problem. For (b), you should give a list of recent state-of-the-art papers (at least 3-5 papers) that you plan to study in-depth for this problem.

Milestone M2: Discussion and Confirmation of Your Topic (by 11-Feb-2009, Week 5)

We will discuss your proposed project topic with you and make necessary modifications/adjustments. We will then confirm your topic with you -- so you can start with your project.

Milestone M3: Project Deliverables (by 08-Apr-2009, Week 12) -- extended to 17-Apr

All project deliverables are due by this date.

CS6234 Projects Page, CS6234 Home Page