CS 341 | Course Info

Course Application Procedure

To apply to the course, follow these instructions:

Form a team of three students. We strongly discourage teams of 2/4 students. Use Piazza to find a project partner.

Find a large dataset that you will work on. Check the list of project ideas that we provide in the Google Slides above.

Write a project proposal (there is no page limit but we do not promise to read more than the first 3 pages). Your project proposal should be structured into the following sections (i.e., it should concisely answer the following questions):

What is the problem your team is solving? Give a brief but precise description or definition of the problem.
What data will you use? Briefly describe the data, its size (number of records, number of GBs) and where will you get the data. It is fine to use your own data but make sure you have it before you propose the project.
How will you solve the problem? Describe your approach. Tell us what method, algorithm, technique do you plan to develop or use and how will you scale them up to your size of the data. Be as specific as you can!
How will you evaluate your method? Here we want you to describe how will you measure performance or success of your method. Against what baseline methods will you compare your algorithm or how do you plan to obtain ground-truth labeled data so that you can then measure accuracy, precision, recall or some other metric that will tell us how well is your method really performing.
What do you expect to submit/accomplish by the end of the quarter?

Your proposal should also include the following info:

Project title
Team member info: name, email address, SUNet id (and your Twitter handle, in case you have it)
Team member description: give us 2 sentence description of your experience that makes you qualified for this class. Tell us what classes you took in the past (CS 246 strongly recommended).

Send us the PDF of your proposal using the Google Form linked in the slides above.

If you would like some help or guidance when developing your project idea feel free to contact course staff. We will help you develop your project idea.

Coursework

All submissions must be performed on Gradescope.

Checkpoint 1 Presentation (10%)

Brief presentation (~5 minutes). Focus on: problem description, dataset, preliminary results / ideas, current challenges.

Checkpoint 1 Report (mandatory but ungraded)

First couple of pages of the final report. Content should cover: problem description, dataset, related work.

Checkpoint 2 Presentation (20%)

Brief presentation (~5 minutes). Focus on: methodology, experimental setup, ongoing results, current challenges.

Checkpoint 2 Report (mandatory but ungraded)

Append an additional couple of pages to the Checkpoint 1 report. New content should describe in detail the methodology and experimental setup.

Final Project Presentation (20%)

10 minutes presentation, covering the work done during the quarter.

Final Project Report (50%)

The result of the project is a 5-10 page paper. We will not accept longer reports. Report should address:

Problem description: Give a brief but precise description or definition of the problem or hypothesis you set to evaluate.
Data: What data did you use?
Experiments:
- Setup: Describe how did you setup your experiments, how the training/testing data was prepared, what your evaluation methods are, and what baseline methods for comparison are you using.
- Results: Describe your experimental results.
- Impediments: What were some of the issues you encountered in your experiments? How did you deal with them?
Future Work: What remains to be done?
Brief conclusion