Research Proposal Specification
CS 495: Senior Seminar, Fall 2009

Rational

• The approved final proposal serves as a contract between you and your senior project advisor. It will help avoid unpleasant misunderstandings about exactly what you intend to accomplish.
• The proposal timeline serves as a guide to make sure that you stay on track; You will be expected to stick to the timeline as best you can. Obviously there will be some adjustments along the way.

Requirements

• Length 5-7 pages typed, double spaced (~1500 words including bibliography).
• It should include or address the following:
  • A detailed description of the project. What is the final deliverable?
  • Rational and Purpose: What is the motivation. Why is this interesting? What aspect of the project is novel (if any).
  • Background/Related work: This should draw on the details in your survey paper. For example:
    • How does your approach differ from existing work?
    • What parts of this topic are well-understood/unknown?
    • What approaches have others tried in this area?
    • What is known about best practices for such a project?
  • What exactly will you do and what will be the biggest challenges. For example:
    • Describe the background (if any) that you already possess, and how this can be brought to bear on successful completion of the project.
    • What technical topics will you need to learn?
    • What are the outstanding questions you feel are necessary to answer in order to complete the project.
    • What programming will be required?
    • What interesting subtleties and choices arise in the design/implementation phases?
  • Identify at least one subgoal milestone. If it turns out that your initial project was too ambitious, this will serve as a reasonable (albeit unsatisfying) completion point insuring that you will graduate with at least a passing grade.
  • A table or chart of the timeline for spring semester. It should identify what you expect to have completed each week (or at least every other week). Include SSRD in the timeline.
  • Bibliography: This will be a subset of the bibliography in your survey paper.