Course Project
PROJECTS
There will be one single project on which you will work throughout the quarter - this is a critical component of the course. Your goal is to propose and tackle a research problem in networks and distributed systems. You may choose to either reproduce a result from a networking paper or take on an original research project.
ORIGINAL PROJECTS
An original project can be a proof of concept of a new networked system, a new measurement effort, or an extension of existing work. Basically, any project that you could realistically extend to a conference-quality paper.
This part of the class is intentionally underspecified and you should select a project that you have the time and experience to accomplish. I will set up a time for brainstorming ideas with you and your team, but of course, great starting points are the papers you are reading for the class. Anything in future directions, open problems or things they have not tried? Could you remove some of the assumptions made? Could you change the context (e.g., CDN replica selection from wired to wireless networks)?
REPROODUCTION PROJECTS
A reproduction project is slightly different. Obviously, you should first select a paper, either a classic or a recent one. Many of ACM conferences are now including badges for reproducibility (“Artifacts Available”, “Resutls Rerproduced”, “Results Replicated”, etc) which may mean a bit of an easier project.
Some questions you may want to tackle for a reproduction projects: Does the primary result in the paper hold up?, Can you generate a plot or graph that looks the same as one of the main figures in the original paper, and explain where it came from?, If you were able to reproduce the original result, could you change/extend/improve the work?.
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. Here is one I found interesting on QUIC.
DELIVERABLES AND TIMELINES
Projects must be written up in a term paper (due during finals week) and teams will present their results at the end of the course in a systems class mini-conference. Projects ideas will be suggested by the instructor, but you are strongly encouraged to come up with your own ideas. Based on the topic of your project, you will be assigned a project leader to help you through the quarter (you will meet weekly with them).
This is the schedule of meetings and deliverables (this is mainly to ensure steady progress):
- Form a group: First week.- Project meeting with instructor: Second week.- Project proposal posted in Canvas (you should read the CSP project startup or look at the Questions that any project proposal should answer – the Heilmeier “Catechism”): Third week- Midterm presentation and report. The presentation should be 4 slides long, including (1) Project name and team members, (2) Revised statement of project goals and list of new/interesting concepts to be investigated, (3) List of issues addressed and pending, and (4) Updated project milestones, highlighting accomplishments to date, and schedule for the rest of the quarter: Fifth week- Final presentation: Last class- Final report: Monday of finals week.
The final report has to conform to the format used by the Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks. Reports should be no longer than 6 pages (you can use appendices or a webpage to document details). The following structure is suggested:
- Abstract: What did you do, why is important and what are your high-level results?- Problem statement: What is the problem you tried to solve?- Prior work: How others have addressed the problem before and why that was not enough?- Research approach: What was your approach to solving the problem? What did you design, build? What was your experimental methodology?- Results: What were your results? How did you evaluate your work? What were your figures of merit?- Lessons learned and future work: If you knew what you know now, what would you do differently? What questions are left for future work?- Summary and conclusions.