CS 466/666 Final Project

For the final project, you will be asked to work on an open problem in Algorithm Design and present a survey about the problem and the outcomes of your investigations at the end of the term, or to present a survey of a topic of your choice (see some example topics below), and analyze one of the main algorithms in that topic.

The ideal project would be a problem/topic that you are excited about - this often brings one the most joy. If you need some guidance in picking a problem to present on, I will be happy to meet with you to hone into a problem of your liking.

The topics below are simply a suggestion. If you have another topic of your interest which is not covered here, I will be happy to try and work out with you a possible project on your topic of choice.

Undergraduate students can do their final project in pairs, but it is not mandatory. I will leave it to you to coordinate the pairing for the final project.

Timeline for the final project

  • October 7th: project teams due
  • November 4th: project proposals due
  • December 18th: project reports due
  • December 14th-22nd: project presentations

Requirements for the final report

A good final report will be one which can summarize in ten pages:

  • a good introduction to the problem being studied (why is it relevant/previous results/current state of affairs),
  • a summary of your approaches,
  • progress made (if you manage to make any, even in particular special cases of the problem - if no progress, I would only ask that you explain/have a solid understanding one of the current best algorithms that solves your problem)
  • conclusion with open questions.

The limit to 10 pages is simply because this is a constraint that even us researchers have when submitting a paper to a conference, so it should be doable to you as well, plus it is great practice :) Plus I intend to read all of them, and this limit will put my reading to somewhere between 300-600 pages :)

Note: the references need not fit on the 10 pages.

Requirements for the final presentation

You are required to prepare a video presentation of at most 15 minutes on the topic of your final project.

You will also have to schedule with me a 15 minute live Q&A period about your project, where I will ask you questions about your project and report. See dates above.

Template for final project

For the final project, we strongly recommend you to write it in LaTeX. A template that you can edit accordingly is given here.

Research-based projects

I highly encourage you all to try your hands at an open problem! It is an amazing and enriching experience, and you may end up solving it by the end of the class!

For those of you who want to use this opportunity to start working on some research problems (perhaps as a pre URA or an URA), here are people that you can check out their webpages/try to reach out to, or resources at your disposal, for you to look for suitable projects:

A good strategy to find interesting open problems is to look at a particular faculty’s advanced graduate course’s webpage and see the topics they are interested in and the open problems in the area that they would be interested in. You can use your final project to get a deeper understanding in such an area where your interests match.

Possible Topics for Final Project

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Last updated on Sep 1, 2010

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