Students will work on privacy-related projects in groups of 1-3 students. The amount of work should be appropriate to the group size. You will be graded on the basis of a project description, a final project report, and you final project presentation.
Project Grading
| Project proposal paper | Feb 14 | 10% |
| Project proposal presentation | Feb 17 | 5% |
| Project status report | Mar 31 | 25% |
| Informal progress updates | Weekly | 10% |
| Final project report | Apr 28 | 35% |
| Final project poster presentation | May 8 | 15% |
Deliverables
- Project proposal (Feb 14): 3 page project description with 1-inch margins, single column, and 11-pt font. You can use an additional page for references.
- Section 1, Introduction (Page 1): Motivate the problem you are trying to solve. Include a couple of references of the most recent work in this area.
- Section 2, Approach (Page 2): Describe your approach for solving the problem. What is new and interesting about this approach? How is it better than existing work?
- Section 3, Deliverables (Page 3, first half): Describe what you hope to accomplish by the end of the semester.
- Section 4, Schedule (Page 3, second half): Propose a schedule of milestones, with a 1–2 week granularity. The goal is to have a plan. It is okay to deviate (within reason) from this plan as the semester progresses.
- References (Bottom of Page 3, or Page 4): Paper citations should be in standard ACM/IEEE format.
- Project proposal class presentation (Feb 17): 10 minutes per group, around 4 slides total on 1) Motivation, 2) Approach, 3) Benefits over existing work, 4) Schedule and Milestones
- Project status report (Mar 31): This report will be an early draft of your final project report. Create a template based on the instructions for the final report and include all sections. I expect the following sections to be well written: Abstract, Introduction, Overview of Approach. In this report it should be absolutely clear by now what you’re doing in your project.Next, the Protocol/Architecture/Design section should have some technical detail on your solution and a high-level architecture of your solution (I want to see that you have started hashing out some of the details), but I won’t expect a polished writeup. Include details about what you have so far and what you’re planning on completing for the final report. The remaining sections should have some placeholder text (such as bullets) showing that you’re at least thinking about what will go in there. Evaluation should include your current plans for evaluation. Related work should contain a sizeable bibliography of papers related to your project.
- Final project report (Apr 28): Conference-quality project report due. 8–10 pages, 1-inch margins, single column, 11-pt font. Suggested outline:
- Abstract (around 200 words)
- Introduction (includes references to highly-relevant related work, i.e., state of the art for the problem you are trying to solve)
- Overview of Approach (a nice and accessible “English” description of your approach)
- Protocol/Architecture/Design/…
- Evaluation (don’t forget to interpret your data)
- Discussion (discuss some of the important simplifying assumptions, and suggest possibilities for future work)
- Related Work (“somewhat related” work goes here; directly related work goes into the Introduction)
- Conclusions (don’t summarize your work here. That’s what the abstract was for. Instead provide some philosophical ruminations of your work and future possibilities, i.e., conclusions that you have arrived at as a result of your work.)
- References
- Final project presentation (May 8): Poster session in Informatics East Lobby.
Late reports?
Manage your time well, and start early!
You have an automatic 4-day extension for each of the project proposal, status report, and final report. You will be penalized 25% for every day it is late beyond this extention. You are required to submit satisfactory versions of these reports within 8 days of the deadline to pass the class.
Project ideas
You can work on any project related to privacy. Please come talk to me for specific project ideas.