Over half your credit in this course will come from your research project. Your first task is to prepare a proposal that describes your plans for the project. You will submit a proposal document and make a short presentation to the class, each for 5 marks.

It is expected that a significant portion of your reading, thinking, and planning will be done by the time of proposal submission. The proposal should guide the steps you take while executing the project. Of course, while actually working on the project, you might encounter surprises that make the plan untenable or less relevant. If so, it is perfectly fine to replan and change direction. What is not acceptable is to start out with poor planning.

The proposal document is to be about 2–3 pages long (including references). As a first order of business, make sure it lists the names and roll numbers of all the members of your team. Make sure that at least one team member uploads the proposal document to Moodle by the submission deadline. If we receive multiple submissions from the same team, we will pick any one for evaluation.

Your proposal must present a clear description of the problem you intend to tackle, highlight the novelty of the proposed work, provide specific details of the investigations you will undertake (such as implementing algorithms A, B, and C and measuring quantities X, Y, and Z), describe expected outcomes and their significance. Reference related work to present the overall context of your investigation, and to pinpoint the novelty of your proposed approach. Don't hesitate to provide any additional information that is relevant to your project. Check language and spelling: both content and presentation will be taken into account for evaluation.

Keep in mind that this is a course project, for which you will get about 3 months. Given this constraint, it is a much better idea to formulate a small, simple problem (which may be a sub-problem of a bigger project) and do a thorough job addressing it, rather than set very ambitious goals and struggle to reach anywhere close. For example, a project for which there is available data and running code is much preferred to one in which you have to yourself set up the first baselines. Your instructor can help you gauge the suitability of a problem and set appropriate goals, but it is for you to seek him out before finalising your proposal.

To begin, submit a first draft of your proposal to Moodle by 11.59 p.m. Sunday, January 18. Further details on the final submission of the proposal document, as well as the presentation, will be put up on this page subsequently.