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Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT)

Dept. of Computer Science (DCS)

Masters IT (eScience)

COMP6702 eScience Project - Research - 18 unit

Semester 2 2007

COMP6720 is a Prerequisite course for COMP6702 (meaning: you have to think about it for your choice of course in the previous semester)

Context

COMP6702 is an 18 unit project course which runs in semester 1 and semester 2 of each year.
Normally it is expected that students will have completed at least 40 units from groups A, B, C and D of the MInfTech  at a Distinction average program before taking a project. This means that the project course would normally be taken during the last semester that a student is enrolled in the Masters program.

This course will comprise an individual research-oriented project. Assessment will be based on a written thesis.

Background and Structure

The minimum entry requirements for the Masters are to have some second year computing (2 courses at minimum). After one full year of Masters study, a student would be expected to be at least as skilled as a good 3rd year BIT student. (A "good" student, because Masters students are meant to have had a Distinction average score in their last year of a degree.) So the Masters eScience project can be thought of as being equivalent in standard to either a Honours CS project or a 4th year software engineering project. This project course is meant to be oriented towards a research outcome so it will be comparable to a (short) Honours project.

Format

Students will write a thesis which will deal with an advanced topic in computing. As part of their work, they will write a literature review and they will develop a "thesis" of some sort which can be justified on the basis of theoretical or experimental enquiry. This will be an individual project and will be assessed mostly on the thesis as well as on seminar presentations. From the Honours Student Resources page, you can obtain a LaTeX template for a thesis, indicating its structure and citation style.

The thesis will have to focus on the research aspect of the project, with no need to concentrate to software engineering process. Nevertheless for a good project in that category, the research content will have to be consistent enough to allow the release of a research paper.

Marking scheme

The project's scope and assessment conditions will be specified in an 'Independent Study Contract' negotiated and signed by the student, their supervisor and the project co-ordinator at the early stages of the semester. Unless otherwise specified in the Contract, the following scheme will be used.

Deliverable	Weighting
Seminars	10.00%
Thesis	90.00%

Project topics

You should already have selected your project topic last semester, as per COMP6702. However, it may be useful to take the opportunity to negotiate any changes to the project at the beginning of the semester.

Supervision

You should meet regularly with your supervisor - about one hour every week. These meetings are important early in the semester to make sure that you clarify the project scope and requirements; that you have the technology required to complete the project; and that you have developed a good project plan. As the semester gets underway, the regular meetings are important to make sure that you are on track and to get some help on technical topics (or some references so that you can solve the problem yourself). Later on in the semester, you should give your supervisor drafts ofyour report so that you can get feedback which will help you improve the final document.

Possible timetable

Week	Dates	Notes
1	16 - 22 Jul	Research Plan Definition Phase (resume contact with your COMP6720 supervisor if not already done so)
2	23 - 29 Jul	Negotiation of Study Contracts
3	30 Jul - 5 Aug	Research Plan Due to Supervisors. Finalization and signing of Study Contracts (*).
4	6 - 12 Aug	Proper Research Phase begins
5	13 - 19 Aug
6	20 - 26 Aug
7	27 Aug - Sep 2
8	3 - 9 Sep
9	10 - 16 Sep	1st draft of Thesis to your supervisor, due end of this week.
9a	1 17 - 23 Sep	Comments by supervisors.
9b	24 - 30 Sep	Draft / comments / draft / comments ...
10	1 - 7 Oct	Near-complete draft of the thesis provided to the supervisor.
11	8 - 14 Oct	Begin to finalize your experimentation, project artefacts and Thesis.
12	15 - 21 Oct	Public Seminar (*)
13	22 - 29 0ct	Final revisions from feedback from seminar
14	29 Oct - Nov 4	Final Thesis due at 4:00 pm on Friday Nov 2 (*)

(*) : Those are the official deadlines. The rest of this calendar is only recommendation. You are supposed to establish your own calendar and stick to it as much as possible (either by following it or by cautiously updating it).