Homework Assignment #3 — Final Research Proposal

HW3 (the final proposal report) is due on 11:59pm Central, Dec 4 (note this is a Wednesday!). Students are required to submit the pdf report through Brightspace. Grace period is allowed for HW3 but you need to email the instructor before the original deadline.

HW3 is the final report for the research proposal which students have started in HW2.

Your high-level goal is to produce and submit a research proposal following the National Science Foundation (NSF) proposal style. In HW3, we will use a simplified structure (see HW3 Format and Content ). If you are interested in the full format of an official NSF proposal, you can find the details in this document (see Part I -- Chapter II).

HW3 Format and Content

Based on the requirements of NSF proposals, we simplify the format and content requirements for CS8395. Unlike HW2, we require students to follow a more strict structure in HW3. While HW2 is more like a white paper to discuss ideas, HW3 should be a formal research proposal with preliminary results. The final research proposal must follow the format requirements below:

  1. Use a standard, single column format for the text.
  2. Must be exactly 7 pages (excluding references) (a formal NSF proposal is 15 pages, we simplify it in this course).
  3. Font size must be either 10 or 11 points.
  4. No more than six lines of text within a vertical space of one inch.
  5. Paper size must be standard letter paper size (8 1/2 by 11").

Just like writing any peer-reviewed publications in computer science, you are highly recommended to use the provided LaTex template (this is the same template for HW2). As graduate students in CS, you are highly recommended to use LaTeX. While some people perfer LaTeX environment on their local machines, Overleaf is a very popular online LaTeX editor that supports collaborative edits.

The HW3 final research proposal must contain (but not limited to) the following sections:

  1. The first page must contain (no longer than one page):
    • Project title
    • Project summary/overview
    • Intellectual Merit
    • Broader Impact
  2. Introduction
  3. Background and Related Work
  4. Problem Statement (you can merge this section to Introduction)
  5. Proposed Full Experiments or Proposed Methodology or Study Design (should be more organized and include more details than HW2)
  6. Preliminary Results: you must present prototype model/study and the analysis results
  7. Conclusion
  8. References

Presentation Format for Final Research Proposal

Based on the total number of presentations for final research proposals in one lecture, each presentation is expected to follow the rules:

  1. The presentation is 15min talk + 5min Q&A. It should be no longer than 20 min in total. There will be 2-3 minutes bufferring time between presentations for evaluation (Q&A can continue at the same time).
  2. Same as mid-proposal presentations, every audience will receive a link for an online evaluation form on Piazza. Students are required to finish and submit this form during the class (no later than 1:00pm on the same day). If you are late for the submission, you receive 0 points for this evaluation task. This evaluation form is easier than the evaluation form for paper presentations: the audience only needs to provide comments/suggestions for the proposed work in the free-text questions.

The evalution criteria for the presentation is similar to mid-proposal presentations but also include the evaluation for proposed methods and preliminary results. Preliminary results are expected to be reasonable data/systems/setups for implementing your proposed work. Forexample, if you propose to develop an automated program repair algorithm for hardware design, you are expected to present repos of data for hardware design as well as the corresponding components in those repos that allow the implementation/mapping of the traditional repair algorithm.

The criteria for the content of final proposal presentation are based on (1) If the research problem is clearly stated; (2) if the proposed experiments/solutions/methodologies are clearly stated; (3) if the proposed experiment/solutions are well-designed to solve the proposed research problems; (4) if the presented preliminary results are sufficient to demonstrate the feasibility of conducitng the proposed experiments/solutions (i.e., is the proposed work doable?).

HW2 and HW3: Proposal Examples

Below are some examples for research proposals that follow the simplified NSF requirements we describe above. The examples are 15 pages (HW3 requires exactly 7 pages -- it should end on the 7th page).

  • Improving Programing Support for Hardware Accerlerators Through Automata Processing Abstractions. By Dr. Kevin Angstadt (currently a professor at St.Lawrence University.)
  • Transparent System Introspection in Support of Analyzing Stealthy Malware By Dr. Kevin Leach (currently a professor at Vanderbilt University.)
  • Understanding User Cognition: from Everyday Behavior and Spatial Ability to Code Writing and Review By Dr. Yu Huang (currently a professor at Vanderbilt University.)

    • How to Submit HW3

    The final research proposal must be submitted in PDF format through Brightspace. If you are submitting in teams, you must include the information of both team members in your report.