You may find useful to take a look at some general advice on choosing a project topic here. Please keep in mind that the general goal is to develop some useful tools to help people manage and make use of text information. Leveraging existing resources is especially encouraged as it allows you to minimize the amount of work that you have to do and focus on developing truly novel functions rather than repeating what people have already done.
When picking a topic, try to ask yourself the following questions:
You are required to write a one-page proposal before you actually go in depth on a topic and post your proposal on the class wiki by the due date.
To post your proposal, go to the Project Proposals page, and add your project to the page. Follow the same format as used by some existing project proposals there. Specifically, you need to create a new page for your project, where you would put your proposal. It is up to you how to design such a page; it could directly contain your proposal or have your proposal as an attachment to this new page. To do that, you simply need to edit the proposal wiki page and add a line like "# [Your project title]" to this page. After saving the page, you can click on the new entry you created, which would lead you to the new page that you created, and you can then edit that page.
In the proposal, you should address the following questions and include the names and email addresses of all the team members. (As long as these questions are addressed, the proposal does not have to be very long. A couple of sentences for each question would be sufficient.)
5. Work on the project
You should reuse any existing tools as much as possible.
See the resources page for some useful pointers.
Discuss any problems or issues with your teammates or classmates. Discuss them with the TAs and the instructor. If you need special support (e.g., more disk space on your account), please let the instructor know.
Consider documenting your work regularly. This way, you will already
have a lot of things written down by the end of the semester.
If a team consists solely of online students, they can pre-record a short voiced Powerpoint presentation, which will be played at the presentation meeting. Please inform the instructor in advance if this is what you plan to do.
In general, the structure of your presentation should roughly follow your project proposal.
So it should very briefly touch all the following aspects:
Your presentation will be graded mainly based on (1) the clarity of your slides and presentation,
(2) whether your presentation has
covered
all the questions listed above, and (3) whether you can finish the presentation within the allocated time.
Think about how you can best present your work so as to make it as easy as possible for your audience to understand your main messages. Try to be concise, to the point. Pictures, illustrations, and examples are generally more effective than text for explaining your project. Try to show screen shots and/or plots of your experimental results.
If you are not familiar with PowerPoint, you can adapt this sample presentation.
There is no strict length requirement, but you may target at 2000~4000 words
without counting any necessary appendices (this is about 4~6 pages with 10-point font or 6~8 pages with 11-point font). Feel free to use any format for your report.
If you have not written such a report before, you may want to take a look at the following sample research papers published in the World Wide Web conferences:
6. Present the course project
At the end of the semester, each project team is expected to make a presentation of the project.
The purpose of this presentation is: (1)
Let you know about others' projects. (2) Give you some opportunity to
practice presentation skills, which are very important for a successful career. (3) Obtain some feedback from
others about your project. Every on-campus student is expected to attend this presentation unless you have obtained
permission from the instructor in advance for not attending.
The course project presentation will be given at 8am-11am, Thursday, May 14, 2015, in room 1320 DCL (our classroom).
There will be multiple sessions (organized based on project topics) with short breaks in between.
Everyone is expected to show up for all sessions.
7. Write a project report
Each team must submit a written project report by Wednesday, May 13, 2015.
You should write your report as if you were writing
a short conference paper. You should address the same questions
as those you have addressed in the proposal, only with more details,
especially regarding some of the challenges that you need to solve in developing
the tool. You should also include some screenshots if applicable and any other evaluation results.
Furthermore, it would be good to include a brief discussion of how your system/research work can be further extended.
The project report should be posted on the presentation schedule page in the same way as you've done for your progress report presentation slides. The deadline for posting your project reports is 11:59pm, May 13, 2015, Wednesday. There are instructions on this wiki page to tell you how exactly you can post your project report.
Each project team only needs to submit one report. However, if there are multiple members in the team, you must include, for each member, at least one sentence to describe what he/she did exactly for the project. .
Grading of a project report will be based on three factors: (1) [25%] clarity and completeness of the report itself (i.e., whether you have clearly described what you have done and addressed all the questions that you are supposed to address); (2) [50%] amount of work that you have done; and (3) [25%] the quality of your project as reflected in the importance of problem being addressed, the quality of solution, and the impact of your project. Since the report accounts for 40% of your overall grade for the project, it means that if you've devoted enough effort (i.e., getting 50% of the report grade), and also done well for the project proposal and project presentation, you should have at least 40*50%+30+30=80 points for your project grade, out of the total of 100 points. On the other hand, if there is no evidence showing that you have done substantial work for a group project and only made superficial contribution, then not only will you lose many of the 50% of the points for the amount of work you've done, but your grades in the parts of the project may be discounted as well. Thus it is very important that you make sure to make enough effort to contribute to your group project. Note that it is your responsibility to figure out how to contribute to your group project, so you will need to act proactively and in a timely manner if your group leader has not assigned a task to you. There will be no opportunity to make up for any task that you failed to accomplish. Everyone is expected to spend at least 20 hours to seriously work on your course project as a minimum, not including the time spent for preparing the presentation and writing the report. In general, all the members of a team will get the same grade for the project unless the report indicates that some member(s) only superficially participated in the project without doing much actual work; in that case, I will discount the grade. The instructor and TAs will provide feedback about your report later by email if we see any way to further improve your work.