Course Project

PROJECTS

There will be two reproducibility assignments you will work on throughout the quarter. The first assignment is a small, warm-up project in which you will reproduce an experiment common to many research efforts. For the second assignment you will work to reproduce a result from a published networking paper.

WARM-UP PROJECT

Public DNS potential benefits and costs. For the first assignment, you are asked to select a set of pages based on some reasonable criteria (e.g., Top 10, Top 10 in Pakistan, Top 10 international news), choose a public DNS service, and measure the impact of using the public DNS service, using your provider DNS as baseline, on both DNS resolution and Web quality-of-experience (QoE).

Your submission should include a description of the selected pages and your criteria for selection, the chosen public DNS service, your experimental setup, graphic representations of your results (e.g., QoE impact of public DNS), and your key findings and observations.

REPRODUCTION PROJECT

For the second assignment you will work as part of a small team to reproduce results from a published paper.

Reproducing research results from a paper will let you gain a detailed, in-depth understanding of an important paper, the research area and underlying concepts, and its key results. It will let you concentrate your energy on the most rewarding part of the research effort, building a prototype or experimental framework and carrying out the experiments, knowing that the problem you are tackling is interesting and can “deliver”.

You will start by selecting a paper, either a classic or a recent one, you are interested in learning more about. We will provide you with a list of conferences and research papers, as examples, you may want to consider for this as well.

After choosing a paper and sketching the idea of your project (what part of the work you want to reproduce and how you may go about it), you may want to contact the original authors, informing them of your intended project and asking for advise and suggestions. We will be happy to help you with this.

As you work through the quarter, you will meet with the staff once a week, to check-in and discuss progress. The final delivery will include a short presentation the class, with the main highlights of the paper and your reproducibility effort, and potentially a public blog post.

This is borrowed from an excellent course initially started by Nick McKeown at Stanford U. You can look at some recent work done in the Stanford class to get an idea of how these projects look like.

DELIVERABLES AND TIMELINES

The deliverables for both assignment will be done via Canvas. For the Warm-Up Assignment, you will submit your proposed experiment during the first week and a final report at the end of the third-week of classes.

For the Reproducibility Assignment, the blogpost and short presentation to the class should cover the main highlights of the paper and your reproducibility effort, including answers to the following questions: Where you able to recreate the experiment? How do your result compare with those of the original paper? Can you explain the discrepancies? If you could not reproduce the work, what was the main challenge you face?

This is the schedule of meetings and deliverables (this is mainly to ensure steady progress):

  • Warm-up - Proposed experiment: Week 1
  • Warm-up - Final report: Week 3
  • Reproduction - Form a team: Week 2
  • Reproduction - Paper selection/project proposal: Week 3
  • Reproduction - Midpoint report: Week 6
  • Reproduction - Final report: Week 9
  • Reproduction - Project presentation: Finals