A large portion of your grade will come from a semester project.
Projects may be submitted by teams of up to three students.
Students may collaborate outside of their teams, with anyone in or out of class (with proper
credit).
At the end of the semester, each team will submit a written document of around 10 pages and give a
short presentation of around 20 minutes at the end of the semester.
Project reports are due Thursday, May 3rd.
They should be submitted by at least one student per group on eLearning as pdfs.
Project types
Projects can take on any number of forms:
-
Theoretical:
Attempt to solve an interesting, non-trivial, and preferably open theoretical problem related to
computational geometry.
-
Experimental:
Implement and experimentally evaluate a few algorithms or data structures for one or more
closely related problems in computational geometry.
Projects of this type will preferably compare algorithms or data structures that have known
theoretical guarantees versus those used in practice in cases where they differ.
-
Scholarly:
Write a comprehensive survey on a topic relevant to computational geometry. Surveys should be a
bit longer than theoretical or experimental reports, and they should include a history of the
topic; a description of motivating applications; a summary of known results; sketches of the
most important algorithms, data structures, and/or proofs; suggestions for future research; and
a thorough bibliography.
-
Creative:
Do something else cool and relevant to computational geometry.
You are strongly encouraged to work on projects motivated by your primary
professional development or research interests.
Project topics need not be limited to specific topics in class, as long as they focus on
computational geometry.
You should work on or study problems whose solutions you want to know but
don't.
Project proposals
Project proposals are due Tuesday, March 6.
They should be submitted by individual students on eLearning as pdfs.
Proposals should be one to two pages in length, and they should include a crisp self-contained
statement of the proposed topic, a brief survey of known results, a
potential plan of attack, and, if theoretical, one or two half-baked ideas that probably won't work
but hey you might get lucky.
After everything is submitted,
I will post submitted proposals to eLearning
as inspiration for final projects.
However, final projects need not focus on any of the proposed topics.
The goal
The ideal result of the project is the creation of a concrete product or
knowledge that can be used in your future career or perhaps a publishable paper.
It's understood, especially if you try for a theoretical project, that you may not find a complete
solution or answer all your questions.
Whatever the result, your writeup and presentation should describe partial results, promising
approaches for ongoing work, remaining questions you would like answered, and ideas that initially
looked promising but weren't (and why).
The main ideas behind the project format and large amounts of the language here are due to Jeff
Erickson.
This page
includes example project ideas from a recent class of his on advanced data structures and a number
of good suggestions on where to find good problems both for this class and in the future.