Final Project

The final project for CSCI 0442 is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your learning while pursuing a topic or domain area of your interest. Your project is worth a total of 45 points towards your final grade, distributed as follows:

Project Presentation (15 points)

You will deliver your project presentation on the last day of classes.

Your project presentation is your opportunity to share the story of your work with me and your classmates. Your presentation should clearly address the following questions:

  1. What is your primary research question, and why is that question interesting?
  2. Who else has thought about this or closely-related questions? What did they do?
  3. What fresh idea or method did you bring to that question? How are you adding to what has been tried before?
  4. What data sets or other resources did you use to implement and test your idea?
  5. What did you find? What did you learn?
  6. What would someone who wanted to develop your idea do next?

The expected length of your presentation is \(9 + 3K\) minutes, where \(K\) is the number of members of your group. So, a group of 1 should present for approximately 12 minutes, a group of 2 for approximately 15 minutes, and a group of 3 for approximately 18 minutes. We’ll have an opportunity for questions after each presentation.

Your presentations will be graded out of 15 points:

  • 10 points for clear communication of your research question and your findings. Each group member receives the same score on these points. These points relate to items like:
    • Are your slides organized?
    • Do they clearly communicate all of the questions above?
    • Does your presentation look like you practiced it ahead of time?
  • 5 points for demonstration of expertise in the material. This score reflects your ability to speak confidently about the subject matter of your project. Each group member receives an individualized score here, although I expect to give full credit to groups with normal good functioning involving ample contributions from all members.

Building Your Talk

Dan Larremore at CU Boulder has a set of slides on how to design and build outstanding talks. The more closely you follow Dan’s guidelines, the more likely you are to earn full credit on the 10 points for communication.

Project Report (25 points)

Your project report is expected to be a structured, thoughtful, polished deliverable. Submitting a first draft at the last minute is not encouraged.

Your project report is a document describing what you did, why you did it, and what you found. The process of preparing your report is a simulation of the process of preparing a scholarly article. You will prepare your report using the article submission template for the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which you can access on Overleaf here.

Your report is graded in the following criteria:

  • 10 points: the report conforms to the requirements stated below.
  • 15 points: the report makes clear that you you made reasonable efforts to learn about and pursue your research question to a satisfying outcome.

Sections

Your report is expected to include the following sections:

  1. An Introduction which states and motivates your research problem and surveys scholarly sources related to your data, methods, or scientific question. Your introduction should include no fewer than \(8 + 2K\) scholarly sources, which are discussed (at least briefly) and cited using the bibtex citation management system.
  2. A Methods section which describes your data set (if applicable) and the mathematical or computational methods which you used. Your Methods should include clear mathematical statements of the methods you use, including appropriately-defined notation, equations, and citations of related literature.
  3. A Results section which describes the findings of your project. This is a good place to put any descriptive analysis of your data set, as well as data visualizations and the major findings of your data analysis or experiments.
  4. A Discussion section which interprets your findings and places them in the context of the scholarly literature you discussed in your introduction. This section should also discuss the limitations of your work and future directions for your research.
  5. A Group Contributions Statement which describes the main contributions of each member to the project as a whole, including conceptualization, code, writing, and presentation.

Your project report should be no less than \(2 + K\) pages long and no more than \(3 + K\) pages long, where \(K\) is the number of members of your group. These page requirements include any figures and tables but do not include references.

This famous paper on assortativity and community structure in networks offers a pretty good example of the structure I’m looking for in your report. Their section “Detecting Community Structure” corresponds to the Methods section, and their sections “Test of the Method” and “Applications” correspond roughly to the Results section.

Additional Report Specifications

  • All group members are expected to contribute to the final project report. It’s ok to delegate sections to specific group members, but everyone should read and revise the entire report before submission.
  • Please don’t use passive voice in your project reports; saying “We did X” is fine.
  • Please avoid use of words that express your opinion or subjective assessment about your results; instead use statements of fact and comparisons. Rather than say that “our method performed well on Y,” say instead that “our method achieved a score of 0.86 on Y, compared to the 0.87 achieved through state-of-the-art methods in Reference [2].”
  • Your report should be in English and should clearly communicate your ideas. Grammatical errors and typos are not a big deal as long as they don’t stop me from understanding what you are saying.
  • Please do not use large language models to generate any part of your report. Your own writing, in words that you have chosen, is better for this purpose than any “improved” versions that you filter through an LLM. Reports that sound like they were written by a bland chatbot are likely to receive lower scores on style and clarity than reports that were written by hand and revised, even if those handwritten reports contain typos or grammatical errors.

Ambition, Creativity, and Achievement (5 points)

There are 5 points for scientific ambition, creativity, and achievement which are granted at my discretion. A “normal, good” project will normally earn 2-3 of these points; an unusually impressive and creative project will earn 4-5.