Final-project writeup

2021 edition, with this text's color serving as a visual reminder.

Due on CMS Thu Dec. 16, 7pm (date determined by the registrar).

The main evaluation criteria will be the reasonableness (in approach and amount of effort), thoughtfulness, and creativity of what you tried, as documented in your writeup. Individual effort within team projects will be taken into account; see item 3 below.

  1. For the author heading, list only the names of your teammates that are enrolled in the class, even if you had external collaborators. (Reason: only students in the class are submitting the paper for a grade.) But see item 2bi below.
  2. Include the following sections:
    1. "Content" sections: introduction/motivation, hypotheses/research questions, related work, data description (how you gathered, cleaned, and processed it), methods, experiments/results,conclusions (what you learned), directions for future work, references.
      • Throughout, highlight your most interesting findings (positive or negative).
      • For the purposes of CS/INFO 6742 submission, your related-work section does not need to be exhaustive; you may cover just 1-3 most-related papers in 1-3 paragraphs altogether.
    2. An "acknowledgments" section: give the name and state the contribution of those who you received significant help from. (This may or may not include your advisor(s), fellow students in the class, or me).
      1. Authorship statement: if you intend to ask or have already arranged to have people other than your 6742-enrolled teammates as authors on any resulting submissions, also name each such person. This may or may not include me.
        Frequently, I am not invited, or am invited and decline being a co-author on class projects since I often don't contribute enough to merit such status, in my opinion, but it's important for you to get in the habit of explicitly discussing co-authorship possibilities or non-possibilities, to prevent misunderstandings further on.
  3. Projects done collaboratively must also include a section describing who did what. External collaborators should be included in this enumeration.

Academic Integrity Academic and scientific integrity compels one to properly attribute to others any work, ideas, or phrasing that one did not create oneself. To do otherwise is fraud.

Certain points deserve emphasis here. In this class, talking to and helping others is strongly encouraged. You may also, with attribution, use the code from other sources. The easiest rule of thumb is, acknowledge the work and contributions and ideas and words and wordings of others. Do not copy or slightly reword portions of papers, Wikipedia articles, textbooks, other students' work, Stack Overflow answers, something you heard from a talk or a conversation or saw on the Internet, or anything else, really, without acknowledging your sources. See "Acknowledging the Work of Others" in The Essential Guide to Academic Integrity at Cornell and http://www.theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/AcadInteg/ for more information and useful examples.

This is not to say that you can receive course credit for work that is not your own — e.g., taking someone else's report and putting your name at the top, next to the other person(s)' names. However, violations of academic integrity (e.g., fraud) undergo the academic-integrity hearing process on top of any grade penalties imposed, whereas not following the rules of the assignment “only” risks grade penalties.