Project Kick-Off

Project Overview

Proposal

• Description of the problem - what will we (meaning the programming languages community) know after you have finished the project that we don't know now? Motivate your project and explain why it is interesting.
• Related Work - this doesn't need to be complete yet, but enough to show the problem is relevant and interesting. You should make sure to relate the related work to your project - why is it relevant to what you want to do?
• Research Plan - concrete description of what you plan to do including:
  1. A schedule with concrete milestones (one should be finishing the final report on April 28);
  2. A division of labor between group members
• Evaluation - description of how will you decide if the project is successful.
  Your grade on the project doesn't depend on being successful as a research project. For example, if your project involved extending a language with a new feature you might propose to evaluate it by taking some existing programs and rewriting them to use the new feature and comparing the size, performance and readability of the original and rewritten programs. If your experiment concludes that the extension you designed is not a good idea, this does not necessarily reflect poorly on your project grade. In fact, it could be a great project if you can draw conclusions about why it was unsuccessful.

Elevator Speeches

Imagine you are in an elevator with a very busy, rich and important person. You have ninety seconds (elevators in buildings with rich and important people in them tend to be faster than the one in our building) to convince her your project is so exciting she should read your proposal and consider funding it generously. In ninety seconds you should be able to explain the problem you hope to solve, why it is interesting (to someone not an expert in your area), and what you are doing to solve it. A successful elevator speech elicits a question from the listener after the elevator doors open; an unsuccessful one drives the listener away as quickly as possible.

In class on Thursday, 17 February, I will call randomly on one student in each group to give an elevator speech on what you are doing. Periodically (and unexpectedly) throughout the term, I will call on random students to give elevator speeches about their projects until everyone in the class has given at least one. Being able to give a good elevator speech is even more important to your future career in research or industry than being able to write well, so it is worth practicing this whenever you get the chance.

Project Grading

Except in exceptional circumstances which are brought to our attention well before the final report deadline, all members of a project team will receive the same grade. The proposal, meetings, preliminary report, and project presentations will be evaulated, but will not be graded separately. Performance on the other stages of the project will be reflected indirectly in the final project grade.

Projects will be graded on a scale of 0 to infinity, where 1 represents a satisfactory project.

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University of Virginia CS 655: Programming Languages

cs655-staff@cs.virginia.edu Last modified: Mon Feb 26 12:48:13 2001