Logistics
Each team will create a project proposal and make it available on the
web. You should explore and choose between various design
alternatives, and justify your chosen solutions based on performance
and cost/complexity considerations. Project reports will describe the
goal of the project, the approach/methodology used, and a discussion
on the results or lessons learned. In addition to designing technical
solutions, you are encouraged to address the economical, financial, and
social impact of new wireless technologies and the applications you
design, e.g., privacy and security issues of location-aware
applications. The project will be graded based on: novelty of work,
solidness of technical content (accuracy, thoroughness, etc), and
presentation.
You can submit your project electronically (more info later).
- 4/2-4/14: Form teams, brainstorm on ideas, and prepare
proposals
How you go about this depends on your situation. If you
already have a clear idea of your project, you can start writing the
proposal (follow guidlines below), post it, and recruit other students
from the class to join your team. If you have a less clear idea, you
may want to meet with other students and brainstorm on a project idea.
- 4/15-4/22 Discuss project ideas in lab. Consultation with
faculty and/or TA. Make adjustments.
- 4/23:Project proposal due (5% grade)
- 4/24-5/20:Literature Survey. Work on design and
development/evaluation plan; Implement your ideas; Get from paper to
demoable prototypes
- 5/16: Progress report due (5% grade)
- 6/6 Presentation/demo (10% grade)
- 6/9: Project report due (20% grade)
Your report should be a technical description of your system, and
should follow the guidelines below.
Project Proposal
Once you decide on your project, you will be asked to write a one
page project proposal that should clearly state:
- Project title and names of team members with email addresses. Include
one primary contact for the team.
- Overview of the project explaining what it is and what problem it seeks
to address.
- Motivations and challenges: why is this problem important and
difficult? Do existing systems or services do something similar, and
if so, how is yours different/better? Your "survey of the
competition" should include both relevant research projects (industry
or academic) and relevant commercial services.
- Main technical ideas/challenges.
How are you going to solve the problems you've raised and motivated
in the previous paragraph? Here's where you can present your new
idea/solution and explain why it's new or better/needed.
- Your plan of attack with milestones and dates, and
- Any resources you might need (so that we can take care of this early
on in the quarter).
I will provide feedback on the project proposals via email or in
person. Feel free to drop by office hours to discuss your projects.
Progress Report
Your progress report is essentially the literature survey and initial
work you have done for your project
(eventually can go into the related work section for your
final report). You should:
- Summarize the existing solutions, show understanding of the
problem and technical challenges
- Discuss the strengths and the weaknesses of previous solutions
- Suggests/speculate viable future directions or better solutions
Any efforts in trying to resolve outstanding issues and missing gaps
are encouraged at this stage. But remember, the content of your survey
should be based on "facts", not pure speculations!
Project Report
Your report should be a technical description of your system and
should contain the following sections:
- Abstract:
A short summary of your report. If the reader remembers only 2 things
about your work, what should they be?
- Introduction/Motivation:
State the problem and goal of your work. Provide a motivation, i.e., explain
why this problem is important and why it has not been solved yet?
Why and how would someone use your system? Give a specific scenario.
State your assumptions, like "Our wireless chat system
will be widely useful because we expect peer-to-peer applications
will constitute 80% of the wireless traffic within X years."
- Related/Previous Work:
Survey what are prior solutions have been proposed, why are they
not sufficient? What are their relative strengths & weaknesses?
How does your system improve on these attempts?
- Design and Implementation:
Clearly state (or
suggest) your approach to solve the problem, i.e., what are your
contributions? any new solutions/designs you are proposing? How are
they different from previous work? Expand on the scenario from the
motivation section. Explain any interesting design tradeoffs.
- Evaluation methodology and research results::
Clearly develop a plan to evaluate your proposed
solution. How do you show that your solution is better?
Discuss what you have found out through analysis/experiments.
Present any measurement/simulation data your have collected.
Describe any proof-of-concept prototype or implementations you have built.
Can you show that your proposed solution work?
- Bibliography:
List of references: .
- Appendix:
If necessary, submit source codes or prototyped systems.