Project Information

One of the major components of this class is the project. The point of this project is to delve further into some aspect that we have been studying. You may do your project either alone or in groups of two to three. The amount of work expected from the project is commensurate with the number of people working on it (i.e., you personally are expected to put in the same amount of work on a project regardless of whether you're working alone or in a group). Keep in mind that I do not require that this project be an implementation. A literature survey is a perfectly fine project. This project should not eat your life.

Schedule

Monday, September 25th: have formed your team by now, and emailed me who is on your team or if you're working on your own. Teams of 2-4 are strongly encouraged
Wednesday, October 18: 2-page proposal due; tell me what problem(s) you want to solve, what's going to be new and challenging about it, how you will try to solve them. Also state what problems you don't consider to be part of the project (i.e., non-goals), and any resources you need that you don't already have.
Wednesday, October 25: feedback on proposal returned to you
Monday, November 6: 5-page midterm status report due; this should describe what you have done, what you have left to do, roadblocks you've encountered, interesting or unexpected questions or issues that uncovered, etc. Included in this report should be 2-3 pages of literature search for related work; this should include both a written component comparing your project to related work, as well as a bibliography
Week of November 13: feedback on status report returned to you
November 22-29: Project presentations. Precise schedule TBD, but everyone should be prepared for November 22. Your presentation should be ~15 minutes long. Here is what I expect out of the presentation (not necessarily in this order):
- A good description of what the project is (inputs, outputs, etc.)
- The motivation for why this project is interesting - why did you choose to do it, and why should we care about the problem
- A discussion of what makes this project non-trivial (especially for the more research-oriented projects)
- A description of how the project fits into the context of the class
- A presentation of the results thus far
- A discussion of what results you expect to get by the project deadline
- A discussion of the difficulties or surprises that you had when working on the project
Monday, December 11 - 8:00am: Final report due. Your final project report is due, along with a group evaluation for those working in groups (see below). The final report must be a full-length (10-14 page single column) conference-style paper discussing your project. You should model your paper on some of the papers we've read this term. Either PDF by e-mail or a hard copy in my box is fine. If you give a hard copy, I'd appreciate an e-mail letting me know that you've turned it in. The goal of saying "conference style paper" is that I want you to include things like:
- Motivate the problem that you're working on
- Provide an example of a scenario where you'd use your solution
- Tell me about the solution that you've created, this includes telling me about what makes the problem interesting and hard. If you'd like, you can interpret this as telling me what problems you ran into.
- Relate it to related work
- Tell me about potential future work - even if you have no intension of ever doing it. Just like in a real conference paper, the goal is for you to show that you know what some of the flaws are with your system, even if you have no intension of solving them. ;)
Note that some of you won't actually create a solution, but just explore the literature, which is fine. In this case, your job is to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches, and, if you feel like there's an obvious choice, say what you would do if you were going to implement a solution to the problem. Note that I do not care about the layout.
In addition to the report, I want each person who is working on a project in a group to SEPARATELY turn in a report on how they felt that all of the group members (yourself included) contributed to the project. Useful information is: what parts of the project you did (e.g., if you divided the work by sections, who did what section), how many hours you estimated that you worked, and how well you feel like you and the other people in the project did.

Project Ideas

Here are some ideas that would be appropriate for the course project. The best project ideas are likely to come from you; however, here are some that you can use as is or use to think of new ones. The projects can run the gamut from all theory to having a heavy implementation component. I'll add more project ideas as I come up with them.

Most database research topics that you would like to pursue. Keep in mind that I do mean research topics; implementing a database application does not qualify. Feel free to send me mail or come by to talk about what qualifies as a good project.
Building a building involves lots of interaction between various users and their data, but this is currently poorly done. For example, if the structural designer discovered that lowering the ceiling by 10 cm could save $50k, it would be necessary to then ask the providers of each other component to separately determine the impact on all of their components. Currently this is basically all done by hand because their data is not integrated. How can this data be integrated more efficiently? I have a project working on integrating such data, and course projects could be found for a number of different facets of it.
In a disaster, all sorts of agencies that haven't had to communicate suddenly have to start communicating. This causes all sorts of schema heterogeneity problems. Exploring these problems and looking a possible solutions would make a great project. I'm also interested in exploring this in the context of the JIIRP project (see the front page article here for more on the context.
Querying data that's stored in a database can be frustrating if you really want a free-text approach. As an example, suppose that you had the DragonDB which contains information about genes, phenotypes, etc, ranging from recent annotations to a couple of years old. What's the best way to do this? Ontologies exist to give synonyms, and some approaches using bayes nets from information retrieval may be appropriate.
Throughout this course, we'll talk about how the concepts that we study relate to your data. Choose some part of your data that is difficult to manage using current data management techniques/software. Describe what would need to change in order for your data to be managed effectively. Relate to readings both in class and out of class.

A word on plagiarism

Your project, as with all of your work, is to be your work. If you take ideas from anywhere else, you have to cite them, and that if you take words from somewhere else, they have to be quoted and cited (taking names of things is okay without quotes as long as they are well cited, but if you're taking more than that, you need to have it in quotes). Copying other people's text or figures and claiming it as your own is not okay; it is plagiarizing.

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Rachel Pottinger
E-mail Address: rap [at] cs [dot] ubc [dot] ca

Office Location: CICSR 345
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