Notes on UROPs and HYPs

Last updated on: Tue Mar 6 12:01:01 GMT-8 2007

This was written during my first year at SoC, and the first time I had to review UROPs and HYPs. I have made some observations about this process that I think might be useful for students. Your comments and constructive criticism are welcome. N.B. - These are my personal comments and observations and should not be construed as any official position by NUS or SoC.

During that year (Semester II, 2003), the grading process took the form of a poster session. Students were given 30 minutes to discuss with two examiners. Students prepared an A1-sized poster of their work and answered questions about their work. Demonstrations were carried out as necessary. Grading works such that a student's project supervisor did not have any direct influence on the project grading; rather, the advisor was free to offer assessments to the examiners, but the assessment did not need to be taken into account.

You may also want to review some notes on how to begin to do research as part of your HYP and UROP. If you want do a project related to the Web or eventually working for Google, you might consider working with me and my group or WING. If you're thinking of doing your HYP with me, please read how I select and rank candidate students at the bottom of this page.

  1. Notes about doing your HYP in the course of the year.

  2. Notes about the thesis and thesis writing.

  3. Notes about the presentation session. From what I understand it used to be an actual presentation of work. With the poster session, certain things have changed and are still changing, but these are some observations I have noted during this last HYP review:

How I decide which students to take for projects

Certain projects that I offer often have multiple students coming to inquire about them. How do I (and possibly others) decide which to choose? Here are some criteria:

  1. Your availability: This is a primary concern for me. Are you going to be around during the summer? Are you planning to go overseas for a semester? How much coursework do you have left to do in the final year? The more time you have available to HYP, the higher the likelihood you can do something substantial. Certain project require a substantial time commitment in terms of learning the necessary prerequisites.
  2. Previous research work: If you are part of the USP or special programme, or have done a UROP, you'll be more experienced with how to do research. Coming up with a suitably structured problem and hypotheses is difficult, writing a thesis for the first time is difficult; so the more experience you have here the easier it will be for you.
  3. Requisite knowledge: For certain projects, you will be required to know some prerequisite knowledge. Practically all my projects require familiarity with CS 3243 Foundations of Artificial Intelligence.
  4. Initiative and personality: This I can only determine in the interviews. It's a two way street: you'll want to interview with various potential supervisors to see whom you feel most comfortable with.
  5. CAP: This doesn't tell me about your research ability but it helps me ascertain how much time you need to spend on coursework. The higher, the less time I will have to worry about your coursework, and thus the more availability you'll have for project work (see point #1)

Min-Yen Kan <kanmy@comp.nus.edu.sg>
Created on: Mon Apr 21 18:25:47 2003 | Version: 1.0 | Last modified: Sat Feb 23 17:28:21 2019