Grad Project Milestone: Topic and Solution Outline

This page is intended only for the Grad Students in the class (i.e., people registered for the CSCI 5448, sections 001 or 003). Make sure that you first familiarize yourself with the two Tracks, Industry-novel and Academic-novel, for the grad project (read Project Tracks).

1. By now you should have spent some time thinking about some approaches to solve the problem that your project is addressing. Prepare a 2-page document describing:
   • the research questions that you try to answer. Why do we care about these questions? Why are they compelling? Why are they relevant? How would the world be different if we knew the answer to these questions?
   • the main technical challenges. Why is it not trivial to solve the problem? Present challenges that you already conquered, but also those challenges that you don't know yet how to solve, or new challenges that you discovered while digging deeper into the problem.
   • your current proposed approach to solve the problem. This is expected to change until the end of the project, but for now you should have a rough idea on how to approach the solution.
   • find at least 5 pieces of related work, e.g., by searching the ACM DL, Google scholar, books, web pages, or scanning the accepted papers of upcoming conferences (e.g., OOPSLA, ICSE, FSE). Write a short paragraph about each related work item: compare and contrast it to your research, how it is similar, but also what are its shortcomings that are addressed by your research
   Use the ACM SIG template for preparing the document. Clearing indicate the names of the people on your team.
2. You will also present in class your current progress. Cover the same points in the template above, you could even do a demo. Plan to talk for about 4 minutes.