Guidelines for Graduate Students

If you are visiting this page, I will assume you are a potential or current graduate student assigned to me. This page just has a few guidelines for keeping on top of your M.S. Project. Please see the CS Department page 10 Steps to a UAF CS Master's Degree for the most current information related to the entire program.

Presentations

Please rehearse your presentation. Avoid putting too much text on your slides and thus be tempted to read them. Use nice typography and color and reduce the contrast on your slides to aid the readers eyes. Watch professional presentations from high quality conferences to get ideas.

Initial Presentation

Expectations. Please complete a literature survey of the problem you wish to work on. We want to understand the state of the art currently used to solve this problem. We also want to understand what makes the problem hard to solve. Then we want to propose a solution for this problem. We want to propose SMART goals.

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timely

Please give me one week to review your survey (see Project Report below) and your slides.

Mid Project Presentation

This is an opportunity to talk about your current progress and the challenges you are currently working to overcome. We want to show early results in this talk, so please prepare to demonstrate your project. Please give me one week prior to review your slides.

Final Project Presentation

Before you give your final presentation, your project report needs to be completely finished and reviewed by the rest of your committee. We want to give them two full weeks before your final presentation. It will take about a month of edits to get your project report ready. You can still be working to produce results, but the writing takes time to get right. March 1st is thus your effective due date to be finished with your first draft of your project report.

M.S. Project Report

Before your initial presentation, we want to complete sections 1, 2, 3, and 4. Please use high quality references in your literature review from conferences or journals. The ACM, IEEE, EuroGraphics, AAAI, etc. have high quality databases you can use to find relevant research for your project. When quoting news articles, please try to use respected outlets like Associated Press or Reuters. I expect no more than 10% to be from other sources (like Wikipedia, commercial websites, etc.). When reviewing other work, please summarize it in a way that the reader does not need to read the original work to understand their method. Here is a general outline to follow:

1. Introduction
2. Previous Work
3. Problem Description
4. Method of Solution
5. Implementation
6. Results and Analysis
7. Conclusion and Future Work
8. Appendices

Please use LaTeX or Microsoft Word to prepare your final report as they have effective tools for managing bibliographies and other major formatting issues. Please stick to the M.S. Thesis formatting rules to not get yourself in trouble. For draft purposes, stick to an 11 point font, double spaced, 1" margins, and do not get fancy with the stylization of your document. You should also use grammar software to help you improve clarity and avoid passive voice, overused words, etc.