This page describes the Phase 2 of the MInf project (MPP2). This is a course that is taken by MInf students in Year 5. In this course, you do the bulk of work on your project, write a comprehensive report, and give an oral presentation of your work.

Some general information is given below, for more exact details see the DRPS page for the course.

Course Resources

MInf Calendar. Contians the due dates for the project and interim report.
MInf Project Report Marking Guidelines

Course Structure

There are five components to this course:

Project group meetings. There will be three of these over the two semesters. These will work exactly the same as in MPP and MPP1 last year.
Individual meetings with your supervisor. Most of the guidance in this course will come from your project supervisor, and you should meet with them regularly (e.g., once every week or two) throughout the term.
Submitting an interim progress report, which will be due early in the 2nd semester (see calendar)
Writing your project report
Giving a presentation based on your work

Assessment

This course is assessed entirely on the basis of your report, which will be read and assigned a numerical mark by two independent readers. The mark will be awarded on the basis of the MInf Project Report Marking Guidelines.

Deadlines

The Project Report will be due on Wednesday of Week 11. (See Calendar, linked above.)

Interim Progress Report

To provide a check on progress, and as preparation for writing the final report, students must submit a final interim progress report that outlines the work you have done so far and what remains to be done. The report should briefly describe your project and its goals, your results and accomplishments so far, what remains to be done, and a timeline for the final semester of your project. It is expected that the report will be about ten pages. You should take the opportunity to write this interim report such that it may be suitable for inclusion in your final report.

The report should also contain a section level skeleton of the final report. You are certainly allowed to make changes to this skeleton when you write your final report, but the exercise of thinking about this skeleton should be useful to you in your planning.

Your supervisor will read and comment on your interim report, either orally or in writing. The report will not be marked. It is intended as a tool for you to help you make sure that you are on track.

The report should be submitted to the ITO (see project calendar, above).

Your Final Report

Report Structure

It is typical for reports to be between fifty and seventy pages long. There is no maximum length. Your report should contain:

Title page with abstract (i.e., a one or two paragraph summary of the contents).
Introduction and synopsis, in which the project topic is described and set in the context of published literature, and the main results are briefly summarized (about five pages).
Discussion of the work undertaken, in which the various sub-problems, solutions and difficulties are examined. Discussion of any implementation should concentrate on overall principles and aspects of particular interest, rather than minute details.
However, you should always make it clear what was completed, and what was left as future work. If in doubt spell it out: tell us which bits of code you could find already written, which bits you had to do from scratch, which bits were routine, which bits were challenging (and why).
If appropriate, a description of experiments undertaken, a presentation of the data gleaned from them, and an interpretation of that data.
Conclusion, in which the main achievements are reviewed, and unsolved problems and directions for further work are presented.
Bibliography.

In addition, the report sometimes contains appendices in which relevant program listings, circuit diagrams, check plots, formal proofs etc. are included.

Some more detailed, but informal, guidelines on report-writing, written by the previous ug4 projects supervisor, are here.

It is recommended that you arrange for your supervisor to read and comment on a full draft of the project report well in advance of the deadline. Ideally you would have a full draft ready at least two weeks in advance, so you have plenty of time to make any modifications that your supervisor suggests.

To fulfil the College's requirements, the submitted report must be accompanied by a signed "Own Work Declaration". Please visit the School's Plagiarism Policy page to download the form.

Word Processing

The project report should be professional and tidy, and you should use a spelling checker program. That said, you should not spend a large amount of time on word processing. The report's readers are mainly concerned with the technical quality of the content.

The recommended word processing system is L^ATEX. Project reports may be formatted using the cs4rep document class, which will automatically ensure acceptable formatting conventions. Laser printer output beyond the free allowance must be paid for (except when printing project reports), so students must make use of previewing facilities before printing. The available previewers are xdvi, ghostview or gv. The project report should be printed on both sides of the page. You do not need a blank page between chapters but please start each chapter on a right-hand page.

Some suggested LaTeX style files

Submitting the Report

Two hard copies of the report, together with two additional copies of the abstract from the report, are to be submitted to the ITO office by the deadline (see the project calendar). Please submit them directly to a member of ITO staff rather than posting them in the submission box.

Printers are a heavily utilised resource near the submission deadline, so it is almost certainly better to use a photocopier to create two of the copies. The colour printers are a special bottleneck because of their speed. Please try to avoid printing large numbers of pages on the colour printer if most of those pages are monochrome. A code for the photocopier can be obtained from the ITO office.

Submitting Project Directories:

At or before the submission deadline for your final-year project you will also be required to submit your project via the project submission web form. This will request you to nominate a "project directory" that contains appropriate supporting evidence for the project examiners, and to provide the location of a pdf file containing your project dissertation. The project directory should contain sufficient additional material to allow the project examiners to come to a decision on matters such as: level of completion of the project, the quality of the project and the amount of work required to complete the project. The web form will contain details of the kind of evidence we expect you to include in the project directory.

You will receive an email with a link to the web form for project submission.

The current marking guidelines and form used to grade final year projects are based entirely on the content of the dissertation. The additional material will be used to assess the accuracy of claims in the dissertation. At the moment there are no plans to change the marking guidelines or the form.

Projects often build on work previously carried out, in some cases re-using code and data from earlier projects. We would like your project materials to be available for further use in research, private study or education, if requested. However, if you decide that you do not want your project materials re-used, please tick the relevant box.

Once you graduate your Informatics computing account will be retained for a period of up to one year. You will be guaranteed access to the account for a period of at least three months after graduation, after that period access may be withdrawn without notice.

Writeable CD/DVDs will be available in the ITO to allow you to create a hard copy of your project directory as well as any other files in your home directory you wish to keep for yourself. You should make any personal backup before you leave or before the three months grace period as after that time all the files in your home directory will be deleted and will not be recoverable.

Penalties for late submission

It is essential that you submit your report on time. The penalty for late submission is high. It is your responsibility to allow an adequate margin for problems which might delay your submission of a report. This includes, but is not limited to, such things as computer failure (whether your own or a University facility), printer failure or queue congestion, loss or destruction of data.

The mark for the project (out of 100) will be reduced in the event of late submission according to the usual University scale. That is to say, 5 marks will be deducted for each working day (Monday to Friday) up to a maximum of five working days. No submissions are allowed beyond the five working day limit.

Any case of mitigating circumstances (e.g., illness) must be explained to your Director of Studies at the earliest opportunity. In no circumstance will any extension of deadline, or other a priori allowance, be made for late submission. Where there are mitigating circumstances, your Director of Studies will present the case to the Board of Examiners, who have sole discretion to rescind any penalty.

Project presentations

After you submit your project report, you will give a 30-minute presentation of your project to the markers and perhaps one more member of staff attending the session, in or around week 1 of the Examination Period (about 3-4 weeks after semester 2 ends). Alternatively presentations may be arranged in the week immediately following project submission. (Refer to the project calendar for more precise information.) You can assume that the second marker is likely to have read your report and may raise specific questions. The focus should be on a high level description of your goals and your results, and not just repetition of sections of the report. You may include a practical demonstration where appropriate, but this is not required. However, your presentation should make clear how you have evaluated your work.

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