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Late policy: two excuse days for each student for the course. This means that a student can be two days late with one submission, or one day late for each of two submissions. 10% deduction per day will be applied for additional late days. More than 3 days late will be an automatic 0. For team work, late days apply to the whole team. Contact the instructor as early as possible in case of extraordinary circumstances such as sickness.
Added Sep 21: The 20% of course marks is split into 13% for discussions and 7% for the in-class presentation. There is one "point" in Canvas for each discussion, and for each wrap-up. These "points" will then be scaled to 13% of course marks. The exact value of a point depends on the total number of discussions, but should be roughly 1% of course marks.
Added Oct 2: Use the extra two days for responses to discussions - responses do not count towards late days. For example, the EWS discussion was due Oct 1, but the discussion is open until Oct 3. So use these extra days for responses. Everyone should "Reply to at least two classmates' posts".
Readings will be assigned for many lectures. Readings consist of (parts of) research and survey papers, book chapters, or similar material. Students will be assessed on their contributions to the discussions in Canvas. A time frame for each discussion will be posted in Canvas.
Optional readings will be suggested throughout for students who want to learn more deeply about a specific topic. Some of these can be chosen for in-class presentations.
To jumpstart the paper discussions, the following discussion template may be useful:
After the end of each Canvas discussion, we will have an in-class wrap-up. Added Sep 21: This will be a short, 5 minutes wrap-up. Use the sign-up sheet on Canvas to choose your paper.
Deleted Sep 21: I will randomly pick (without replacement) one student to lead this. When each student had their turn as the wrap-up leader, I will refill the random pool with all students.
Added Sep 21: In class presentation: select a paper of your choice, either from the lists in our resources, or your own. There will be a sign-up sheet for the date of each presentation. Please confirm topic and date with me. Format is 20 minutes presentation, plus 10 minutes lead a discussion. All students are expected to also read the paper before class, and participate in discussions.
Form teams for the programming assignments and for the course project. A team has 1, 2 or 3 students. You can form different teams for each assessment. You need to tell me and I will keep a record.
Projects can be done in groups of 1, 2 or 3 students. Group projects require a clear description of who-did-what. The project is split into steps 1-5. Details are described below.
A 3 page writeup of progress so far, successes and obstacles, how you plan to adapt plans for rest of project, etc. Can include early results if available.
There will be a combined final presentation / software demo. Show all of us what you have done, and explain your project before I mark it.
For the presentation/demo, show what your program can do, e.g. what test cases it can solve, what results it generates, anything else that is interesting about it. After the presentation you will receive feedback and you can update it. Submit the final version together with your final project and report in Step 4.
Submit all data relevant to evaluating your project, such as source code, results from tests, scripts etc. In principle, submit enough information to make your work repeatable. If you modified existing software that is available to the instructor, you can submit a patch file instead of the whole package. Indicate precisely which version your patch applies to.
Submit all components of steps 3 and 4 of your project, including the software, test data,... and your presentation in a single tarred gzipped file in Canvas.
The project report should be 10-15 pages. The details of formatting are up to you. Submit as single pdf in Canvas. A good report will contain most of the following elements. Mandatory items are marked with a *.
Here are some general guidelines:
good
not so good
Step 4 of the project is worth a total of 20% of your mark. In order to evaluate the project, the report is my first source of information. Other sources of information are the final presentation and project demos. I will give one overall score for this project step, no formal breakdown into components, but I will write comments. Important points of evaluation are scientific merit, quality of results, quality of report, and amount of work done. My judgment will be based on several dozen current and previous graduate projects that I have evaluated.