CMP 161 -- Final Project Guidelines

Important Dates:

Jan 20, 2012, Midnight -- Preliminary project proposals due.
Feb 3, 2012, midnight -- Final project proposal due.
Week of Feb 27, 2012, in class -- Presentation on project work-in-progress.
Mar 19, 2012, 8-11 am -- Final Project demo and writeup.

NOTE: There will be a 2% LATE PENALTY for EACH item that is late. The 2% is based on your course grade, not just the project grade! March 19 is the final deadline. Nothing will be accepted beyond that date. Don't wait till the last minute -- allow for machine down-time, running out of disk space, power failures, etc. Don't expect to get immediate response to your proposals if you submit at the last minute!

Final Project:

The final project may be an individual or a pair project meant to be developed and completed over the course of the quarter. It is self directed in the sense that you get to choose what project you want to do -- but also requires our approval. The main considerations for approval are:

there's sufficient visualization content in the project,
it's a reasonable size project that can be completed within the given time,
there's enough variation from other students' project.

Projects are first come, first serve. It's to your advantage to get your project approved early. You'll also get a head start and have more time to do a better project. There are four checkpoints to assure you are making adequate progress. These are described below:

Checkpoint 1: Preliminary Project Proposal:

Submit three project ideas that you would like to work on. Rank them in the order of your preference. Provide enough detail to explain each of your idea. You can submit the list to me, preferably by email (or by hardcopy, only if you have drawings). I will respond to you by email, so be sure to include your email address in the hardcopy.

You will get a response within 24 hours. If not, that means your message got trapped by my spam filter. Be sure to send from your UCSC account. If you are including attachments, send me a separate email (without any attachments, no html tags, etc.) to alert me so that I can look for your email in case it gets trapped by my spam filter. Better yet, send me an email with a link to your attachment(s).

Since students should preferably work on different project topics, those getting the proposals in early and finalized get 1st dibs on the topic.

Check the approved list of projects to see the status of your prelim project proposal.

Don't wait till the last minute to submit your proposals since it may take more than 1 iteration to arrive at your final project.

If you want to get some ideas on possible projects, check out final projects from previous quarters e.g. Winter 2011 Approved Projects. Click on the links under "Topic". Also checkout the NSF Visualization Challenge and the IEEE Visualization Contest for additional ideas or projects to work on.

Checkpoint 2: Final Project Proposal:

This is a 1-2 page writeup describing your final project in more detail. It also serves as your 1st draft of the Project Report. Include your name(s), project title, project description, goals (list of different project components/features), and a time line on when you plan to complete different pieces of the project. Also include any research/readings/references you have read that are relevant to your project.

Create a final project folder or directory and put all related items in there. Name this folder proposal. You should set up your report as an html file. Name this file index.html. All contents, images, movies, models, etc., including url materials, should be contained within the proposal folder.

Proposal Submission.

submit cmps161-ap.w12 proposal proposal

If system does not let you submit a folder, zip or tar the folder before submitting:
submit cmps161-ap.w12 proposal proposal.zip
or
submit cmps161-ap.w12 proposal proposal.tar

Hastily prepared final project proposals that does not meet these requirements will incur point deductions.

These will be compiled into the approved project list, similar to the one from Winter 2011.

Checkpoint 3: Project Update:

This is an oral presentation of your work-in-progress. Prepare no more than 5 powerpoint slide that describes your project, results to date, and remaining work to be done to complete the project Include images and/or a live demo if one is available. In-class presentation is limited to about 5-10 minutes per project. This exercise will also allow us to trouble shoot any technical difficulties that may arise during the final project demo on 3/19/12. It is also a good opportunity to get feedback from your classmates and still give you some time for making changes and improvements. Put materials related to your project update e.g. powerpoint file, etc. into a folder called update and submit that.

Update Submission.

submit cmps161-ap.w12 update update

If system does not let you submit a folder, zip or tar the folder before submitting:
submit cmps161-ap.w12 update update.zip
or
submit cmps161-ap.w12 update update.tar

Checkpoint 4: Final Project Requirements:

Project Demonstration. Each student or pair will have 5-10 minutes to present their final project to the class. Be sure to allow your window to be resized to the entire screen so folks can see your output. The demo will be held in our lecture classroom. Most students prefer to run demos from their own laptops. If you are a Mac user, be sure to bring a video adaptor to a VGA port.
Project Report. This class satisfies the capstone requirement for the CS degree. Part of this requirement is ``significant writing'' which can be met by a properly written project report for this class. The project report consists of 2 parts:
- a technical paper between 4 pages (if 2-column text) and 8 pages (if single column text) in length, properly formatted, with 11-12 point font size, output as a file. It should have a title, paper heading, abstract, introduction, related works, technical detail, results, conclusion, and reference sections. The technical paper should have at least 2000 words. Here's a sample for the single column format and a 2-column format .
- a separate online report in the form of a web page. See below for details.
Online Report. This report should be in the form of a web page and should contain the following information.
- your name, which class and quarter,
- title and description of your project,
- somewhere near the top of the page should be links to your technical paper, and source code/executable,
- images and/or video clips of your project (links to you-tube are NOT acceptable; watch your file size and know your disk quota -- 100mb),
- details about your project e.g. data structures, program structure, related works, your improvements, references, etc.
- a user's guide,
This portion of your project requirement requires significantly less time to prepare compared to code development. Yet, students in the past have needlessly lost easy points on this requirement.
Note that all links should be relative (not absolute paths), and that you should submit the html and all necessary image and animation files in the same directory. This time, name that directory proj. Everything must be contained inside this directory. No links to external sites allowed. Create a zip or tar file of all the items of this directory for submission.
Project Submission. Create a zip or tar file of your final project folder or directory. Name this proj.zip or proj.tar respectively. From unix.ic.ucsc.edu, type:
submit cmps161-ap.w12 proj proj.tar
or
submit cmps161-ap.w12 proj proj.zip
- Include the following:
  - your project report (html file and contents)
  - an image to be used as thumbnail for your project -- name this file thumb.jpg (even if it's not jpg)
  - source code, makefile, etc. to compile your code,
  - any *new* data sets, if any,
  - README file for information on platform, compilation, etc.,
  - at least two favorite images of your project, "xv" or "snapshot" can be used on the suns; on the macs, < shift >< apple ><3> keys held down together will produces a .pict image file of the whole screen, crop this with your favorite image tool; on windows, try < control >< printscreen >.
  - a short movie clip of your program in action , say about 5-10 seconds. Watch the file size and keep it reasonable. Save movies as quicktime or mpeg.
- VERY IMPORTANT: The TA will be checking to make sure you have all the required components on March 19. Each of you will receive an email from the TA confirming that either everything is okay, or you are still missing something -- on March 19. Missing items should be turned in by midnight of March 19. Failure to do so will mean that you did not complete this class. Check your email on March 19.
Final Project Grading.
- There will be no early bonus points for the final project. Late programs will not be accepted.
- However, there will be bonus points for more challenging projects; and likewise, less points for less challenging projects. Range is expected to be around +/- 10 points.
- Breakdown of points
  - Project Report requirements -- 20%
  - Project Demonstration requirements -- 10%
  - Project Functionality (meets the proposal goals) -- 70%

CONTEST!

As an added incentive, we'll be running a competition among your projects. Winners get a chance to select some goodies. Here's a sample voting/entry form .