Project Proposal and Term Paper Outlines

All proposals should contain the following:

  1. Project or term paper title
  2. Type of project ("system", "measurement", "data analysis", "literature review (survey)", ...) or some combination
  3. Project abstract (paragraph, similar to web page project description)
  4. Team members and their principal responsibilities
  5. Schedule, with at least bi-weekly milestones for each team member
  6. Project risks (e.g., system performance, data quality, ability to find suitable literature or interview candidates) and mitigations

The project plan should be submitted in PDF via CourseWorks.

Different types of projects should contain the additional sections, as shown for each type below. I use the term "project" and "term paper" interchangeably.

In some cases, you may not have fully settled on the details, e.g., if you're scheduling a discussion with the TA or me, so you can fill in what you know and what options you are considering.

Experiments and Implementation

  • Platform (OS, programming languages, tools, major libraries or frameworks)
  • Detailed description of functionality - architecture pictures are helpful
  • How do you plan to test the system? Regression tests? Test cases?

    • In general, you should strive to make your system work in more than one OS, e.g., Windows and OSX or Linux.

    Data Analysis

  • Sources of data and availability (public, proprietary, survey, ...)
  • Are there privacy human subject concerns (e.g., for surveys)?
  • What are your hypotheses that you want to test?
  • What tools are you using for analysis?
  • How are you testing the validity of your analysis (e.g., confidence intervals, t-test, ...)

    • Review and Summary

  • Literature and other sources you intend to use (starting point, not all papers or reports)
  • What are your primary questions you want to answer?