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).

We are describing below the main distinction between the Industry-novel and the Academic-novel track. The industry-novel will typically involve researching a topic that is of interest to an industry audience and synthesizing some new knowledge. For the Industry-novel track, the problem domain is relatively well understood, and the major solutions are already designed by others and available in the industry, but what is missing is a lack of knowledge about various nuances of the existing solutions. For the Academic-novel track, currently there exists no (satisfactory) solution for the problem domain. In this case the project is pushing the frontier of knowledge for OOAD and invents a new solution, and then empirically validates that the proposed solution is effective. Ask yourself: is this the kind of project that leads to a research publication at OOPSLA, ICSE, or FSE, which are the main conferences advancing the state of the art in OOAD.

Project ideas are due to be presented in class on Friday, 02/05. For students who cannot attend the live class, they will self-record their own video, and post the link on Piazza to their video file. On the first slide, please indicate "Present Live" (if you will do a 2-minute live presentation in class) or put the link to the 2-minute video file (if you are one of the students not attending the class live). When you pitch your project idea, use these slightly different templates, depending on the track:

Template for Industry-novel Track 2

• Topic title being proposed (clearly marking the Project Track 2)
• Current Team members (list name and email so that others can contact you to join you)
• What is the problem, i.e., what is the gap in the industry knowledge that you are trying to fill in? What is the relation to OO and major elements in the class?
• Why is it important to fill in this knowledge gap?
• What is the current industry state-of-the-practice related to this problem, nd what are its limitations?
• What is your proposed solution, i.e., how would you go about to cover this knowledge gap?
• What is your personal reason for selecting to research this topic?

Template for Academic-novel Track 3

• Topic title being proposed (clearly marking the Project Track 3)
• Current Team members (list name and email so that others can contact you to join you)
• What is the problem you are trying to solve? What is the relation to OO and major elements in the class?
• Why is the problem important to solve?
• What is the current state-of-the-practice or state-of-the-art in solving this problem, and what are its limitations?
• What is your proposed solution?
• How would you convince the professor, classmates, and the research community that your solution is successful?
• What is your personal reason for selecting to research this topic?

Examples of project ideas

The Project Tracks lists several ideas of topics for each track, and also lists examples of academic-novel projects that grad students conducted in Professor Dig's classes (and some students even published in academic conferences).

Submission and Presentation Procedure

You need to submit a PDF file (e.g. you can use PowerPoint, OpenOffice, or Keynote, but please convert them to PDF) addressing the points in the templates above. Submit the PDF on Canvas, before 12PM on 02/05. Afterwards, the professor will load all presentations on his laptop. Students will have two minutes on class on Friday (02/05) to pitch their idea on Zoom (while the professor will share the slides from his laptop - this will eliminate valuable time lost in switching screen sharing on Zoom). For students who are not attending the live session of the class, we will offer an opportunity to pitch their project idea on Piazza, by posting the link to their self-recorded 2-minute video.

To make it easier for people to become aware of the project ideas pitched by others, put your topic title/subject in this Piazza page to avoid duplication of topics with other teams.

Once the submitted topic is approved by the TA and professor, you will move on to the Grad Project Milestone 1: Topic Outline.