Architecture Research Project (Project 1)

CS 441, Dr. Lawlor
A substantial chunk of your course grade comes from the two semester projects.  Project 1 is more research-oriented.  Project 2 will be more applied and implementation-oriented.  From the syllabus:
    PROJ1: a paper and in-class presentation on an architecture topic of your choice, due in October.

Here's what's left of the semester, before the midterm on October 20:
   September 2009   
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 <- topic due

October 2009
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 <- writeup due
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 <- presentations
18 19 20 21 22 23 24 <- midterm exam
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Please have your project 1 topic (see list below) picked out by class on Tuesday, September 29.  You don't need to write anything up, but you should be ready to give a useful two-minute synopsis of the topic, so some background reading is recommended!  We'll assign the time slots for the real presentations in class.

I'd like you to prepare a brief 2-3 page lecture note style writeup in HTML, with lots of hyperlinks.  I'll post your writeup as the lecture notes for that day's class.  The writeups are due at midnight Thursday, October 8

We'll start with the presentations on Tuesday October 13, and continue on Thursday October 15.  There are twelve people in class, and two 90-minute class days, so that's about 15 minutes per person.  You should prepare about 12 minutes of interesting, informative content, which leaves 3 minutes for questions and to change speakers.  PowerPoint is NOT required, but you MUST have a clear idea of what you will present AND some sort of examples/illustrations/code/graphs.

Sadly, I'll be travelling during the presentation week, so I'm going to use you each as spies to determine how good the presentations really are.  I'll have you each fill out a small description of each speaker's talk, listing:
Speaker: ____________________     Subject: __________________________________________________________________________
What is it? _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
How's it work? _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Why do I care? _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

HINT: If you make this information easy to extract from your talk, everybody will be happier!

Possible Project 1 Topics

Or choose your own topic!  Topics can all be research of the form "Learn and present what people have done about X" rather than applied work of the form "Build a new X".  Of course, if you really *want* to write code/solder something, I'm not going to stop you!