Project Proposal Grading Rubric

Only one project proposal needs to be handed in per group. The idea behind this proposal is that:

• I can give you feedback and suggestions on the feasibility of the project
• To make you come up with a reasonable plan as a baseline. You don’t have to do what you say in your proposal, and can completely change the project afterwards if you want. But it’s important to have at least one reasonable plan to start from.
• To get you started on the final project report.

Length: 2 to 4 pages, not including appendices. Don’t be afraid to keep the text short and to the point, and to include large illustrative figures.

1. Abstract (20%) that summarizes the main idea of the project and its contributions.
   • Should be understandable to anyone in the course.
   • You don’t need to say everything you did, just what the main idea was and one or two takeaways.

2. Introduction (20%) that states the problem being addressed and why we might want to solve it.

3. Work plan (20%)

   • Write a list of activities that could in principle get you to the finished product, along with time estimates for each. Here’s an example:

     • Extended literature search and writing related work section (3 hours)
     • Downloading baseline and reproducing previous results (4 hours)
     • Finding appropriate datasets and converting them to same format (3 hours)
     • Running baselines on datasets and tweaking hyperparameters (4 hours)
     • Instrumenting model to track quantities of interest (2 hours)
     • Plotting quantities of interest (1 hour)
     • Making main figure (1 hour)
     • Writing project report (4 hours)

   • You should order your work plan so that you can “fail fast”, i.e. if possible, check the basic feasibility or assumptions of the idea before you do anything else. If the project doesn’t go as planned, that’s OK too, but you should try to allow as much flexibility as possible.

4. Description of proposed results (20%)
   • Write a list of proposed experiments, figures, results, tables, or summaries. For each one, say what the reader could learn from it.
5. Related work section and bibliography (20%)
   • Clearly distinguish what previous works did from what your proposed contribution would be.
   • Include a 1-2 sentence summary of at least 3 closely related papers. I realize you might not know about all related papers (or have time to carefully read all related papers), and that’s OK.
   • Using bibtex is annoying at first, but worth it in the long run. Google Scholar can give you the bibtex entries.