Computer Science Senior Seminar and Project, Fall 1999

August 31, 1999

Overview

• Senior seminar will be a small group or individual research, design, and implementation project chosen by each student or self-selected group of students. Students should be encouraged to work individually rather than in a group.
• Projects would be approved by the faculty member leading the senior seminar. The expectation is that this would be a significant project acting as a "cap-stone" for their CS education. Depending on the student's (or sub-group's) interest there may be more of a research and writing aspect to the work or possibly more design and implementation of software.
• The projects would be structured with various deliverables during the semester culminating with a colloquium at the end of the semester. This would be agreed upon in advance by each student (or sub-group) and the professor.
• The professor will arrange for each of the students taking the senior seminar to give informal presentations (3 minimum) during the semester to the senior seminar group and any other interested faculty and students.

• Selected readings from "The Age of Spiritual Machines : When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" by Ray Kurzweil.
• Selected readings from "The Future Does Not Compute : Transcending the Machines in Our Midst" by Stephen Talbott.
• Discussion of the readings.

At minimum I plan to remind you regularly (nag?) about preparing to take the CS GRE test. Most of you will be taking it in December. The faculty spoke at length about tailoring the senior seminar towards GRE prep and decided that it wasn't the right place for it. Instead we committed ourselves to facilitating review sessions on particular topics as requested by students. Since we'll be seeing each other as a group regularly each week I imagine it will be easiest to discuss this during the seminar.

We'll be meeting on Monday and Thursday, 1-2:20pm. On some days there will be presentations, others will be discussion of the readings and related topics. I'll want to check-in with you on your projects as well during the course of the semester. Since we can all learn from this I plan to do it during our regular meeting times.

What to Turn-in When

• End of September
  
  • 1) Outline of your research paper
    
  • 2) Outline of your design & development or implementation plan
    

• End of October
  
  • 1) Draft of your research paper
    
  • 2) Draft of your design & development or implementation plan
    
  • 3) Initial release of software or environment
    

• End of November
  
  • 1) Completed research paper
    
  • 2) Completed design & development or implementation plan
    
  • 3) Completed software or environment
    

• December
  
  • 1) Colloquium (final, formal, presentation
    

How the Projects will be Graded

The highest grade possible is an A, the lowest an F. Printed copies of the documents will be due in class on the days listed above unless we agree to change a particular item as a group. Each day a particular item is late will cost about 1/2 a grade.

Through-out the project your logs should be available and up-to-date. I'll add links to them on this page when they are available. A text file in a location that's visable to a web server is as complex as the log needs to be. The important issue is using it as a tool to guide your work.

I'll average the three grades for the paper (weighted towards the final version) and do the same for the code and your log. Then I'll average those three together (equal weights) for a final grade for the project.

Project Logs

Project Descriptions, Writings, and Software

Final Presentation Schedule

These should be about 45 minutes each including time for a question and answer session.

Unsolicited Advice

This space available.

Work hard, learn lots, have fun. (Ray Ontko, early 1990's.)

Links of Interest

Perl version of libpcap, the routines that underly tcpdump and similar packages can be found here.