Architecture Research Project (Project 1)

CS 441/641, Dr. Lawlor
A substantial chunk of your course grade comes from the two semester projects.  This project will be 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:
    October 2012      
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3 4 5 6 <- project topic due
7 8 9 10 11 12 13 <- project rough draft due
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 <- midterm exam
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 <- project lecture notes & presentations
28 29 30 31
Please have your project 1 topic (see list below) picked out by class on Tuesday, October 2.  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.

CS 441 Students:
Give me a rough draft of your progress by Thursday, October 11.  If you're doing mostly research, give me an unedited summary of what you've found so far.  If you're doing some applied work, give me some simple working code/circuit diagrams/etc.

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 lecture notes are due at midnight Tuesday, October 23
CS 641 Students:
The big difference is you're going to be writing an honest-to-goodness research paper, in third person format, with at least a dozen citations.

Give me a rough draft of your paper by Thursday, October 11.  This should be formatted correctly, and have a solid introduction and at least some discussion of prior work.

Give me the final draft by midnight Tuesday, October 23.  This should be publication-ready: full discussion of prior work, citations, etc.

We'll do the presentations on Thursday, October 25.  There are seven people in class, and 90 minutes, so that's about 12 minutes per person.  You should prepare about 10 minutes of interesting, informative content, which leaves 2 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.

Possible Project 1 Topics

Or choose your own topic!  Topics should be mostly 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!