ENSF619 (Winter 2025) Project Description
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Table of Contents
1. Project overview
Students are required to engage in a novel, semester-long research project. The research project will be done in teams. Students are discouraged from working alone on the research project. Students will have the flexibility to either choose from the list of projects provided by the instructor or formulate their own with the help of the instructor. Each project will likely require a different skill set from the participants; students should be prepared to learn new technologies "on the fly" to successfully complete the project.
2. Project goal
The ultimate goal of the project is to produce a term paper that is fashioned like the papers found in the academic security literature. To make this problem tractable, it has been deconstructed into a set of deliverables that must be submitted at various points during the semester. The deliverables generally consist of preliminary versions of the final paper in various stages of completion.
3. Identifying a suitable project topic
Students must discuss their project idea with the instructor as early as feasible during the term. The project idea must be approved by the instructor prior to delivering the initial project description.
Students can either come up with their own idea, or pick an idea among a list of proposals by the instructor. The instructor will upload a list of such proposals in D2L around the beginning of the semester.
4. Deliverables
4.1. Due dates
Due dates for all deliverables are specified in the class schedule. As specified above, students must initiate a discussion about their project topic as early as possible in the semester, and have their project idea approved before submitting the project proposal.
Students are also expected to reach out to the instructor at least a week before each deliverable deadline to discuss the state of the project and resolve any question or doubt they may have.
4.2. Preliminary requirements
All documents submitted as part of the project must use the IEEE template which can be found at:
https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html
Students can choose to use either the LaTex or Word template. Note however that all write-ups must be delivered as PDF (i.e., regardless of the source format you choose, make sure to generate a PDF to submit as deliverable).
4.3. Project proposal
The proposal document must include a single section titled "Proposal" (no abstract). This section will describe the work to be performed according to the following structure:
- Problem description: what problem are you aiming to solve?
- Limitations of current approaches: show preliminary evidence that the problem has not been solved yet
- Main challenges: which problems do you expect to encounter in solving the problem? How do you plan to tackle them?
The research proposal will likely be at least three pages.
4.4. Project intermediate report #1
The first intermediate report must extend the project proposal document by adding the following sections:
- Literature Review: Students must perform a survey of the research literature to determine what work exists in the field and how their proposed project will fit in with these goals. Students should identify a set of prior works in the area and compose a short paragraph describing the work, its contributions, and how it is distinct from the proposed project. This literature review will likely be at least two pages.
- Methodology: The methodology write-up will describe the experiments, in detail, that the students will perform as part of the project. The methodology must be articulated to the extent that another researcher in the field could replicate the methodology without prior knowledge of the project. The methodology section will likely be at least two pages.
4.5. Project intermediate report #2
The second intermediate report must extend the first report by adding the following sections:
- Empirical Results: Students should describe the results of conducting their research experiments. This section should identify what exactly the outcomes are and whether the results are significant. If the results are not yet ready, the student may use placeholders. However, the results section must be written in detail such that results could simply be plugged into the writing/tables and be readable. This section will likely be at least a page.
- Conclusion: Students should write a conclusion for the work, summarizing the contributions, the impact, and potential for follow-on work. This section will likely be at least half a page.
4.6. Final project packet
At the end of the project, the students must submit:
4.6.1. Final project report
The final report must consist of a reworked version of the second intermediate report, with the following changes:
- The "Proposal" section must be replaced by an "Introduction" section. This section is expected to be an abridged version of the original proposal section, with the following structure: (i) problem description; (ii) limitations of current approaches; (iii) main challenges and how they were solved; (iv) summary of evaluation & results; (v) summary of the rest of the paper. It is likely that you will need to make some changes to the original "story" in the proposal due to the reality of how the project actually carried out. The introduction will likely be around one page long.
- A new "Abstract" section must be created at the beginning of the write-up. The abstract will summarize the motivation, contributions, and key results of the work in a concise manner. The abstract will likely be at most three paragraphs.
- Any missing result must be filled in into the "Empirical results" section.
4.6.2. Project implementation and data
While the research project is described in terms of writing outputs, students must also submit any code, tools, and data that have been used in pursuing the research project.
4.6.3. Statement of autorship
Each project team must include, in the project packet, a statement describing the role of each student in completing the project. This document must explicitly state that the information presents an accurate depiction of how the project was completed, and must be signed by all students in the team.
4.7. Project presentation
Towards the end of the term, students will present their work to the class using slides. These presentations will likely last 30 minutes, including questions. Students are expected to prepare and practice the presentation to give it as if it were being presented at a conference.
4.8. Submitting deliverables
All deliverables must be uploaded under the appropriate assignment on the course D2L page. The final project packet may contain files that are too large to be uploaded on D2L; in this case students are advised to upload such files separately to an on-line file storage service (preferably on the University OneDrive account) and include a link to such files in the project packet.
5. Grading
- 15% Project description: does the project description precisely and convincingly motivates the project, describes the project plan, and lists project goals? Is the project idea original?
- 15% First project report: does the report adequately characterize related work and presents a well thought-out methodology?
- 15% Second project report: does the report show that a convincing amount of progress has been made towards the project goal? Is the presentation of results structured in a clear and convincing manner? Are the (preliminary) conclusions grounded in the work done so far?
- 15% Project presentation: was the student able to present the work in an informative and concise way?
- 40% Final project report: does the project report presents an exhaustive and informative exposition of the project's goals and results? Are the project implementation/dataset in a state suitable for reproducing the results?
6. Expectations
Each project is expected to produce a publication-quality report at completion. Students will receive full credit for projects that are methodically investigated, even if they yield negative results (e.g., the hypothesis does not hold) through no fault of the students.
Students must be careful to appropriately credit sources. While students may quote other sources with proper citations, such quotations should be minimized. Excluding quotations, students must write every word in their research papers. Copying material without appropriate citation constitutes plagiarism and violates the University of Calgary Misconduct Policy.
This project description may change at the discretion of the instructor. Good luck!