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Honours Project (INF-4-PROJ)

This web page describes those aspects of the Honours Project that are largely unchanged from year to year. It is designed to supplement rather than replace the formal Course Descriptor.  For information specific to the session 2011-12 e.g., list of project proposals, allocation of students to projects and supervisors, project group meetings, diary of significant events - please point your browser at Session 2011-12.   For information specific to next session, please point your browser at Session 2012-13.
Any questions or comments should be emailed to Helen Pain at the email address helen AT inf DOT ed DOT ac DOT uk.

Index

• Staff-Only pages
• Assessment
• Project materials
• Progress documents
• Project group meetings
• Project presentations
• Group Meeting Times
• Producing a project report
• IPR, confidentiality
• Information for external supervisors. This information may be of general use to new members of staff.

Introduction

The project involves both the application of skills learnt in the past and the acquisition of new skills, on a substantial piece of independent work. The types of skill required vary from project to project, but six main areas of work are required:

• gathering and understanding background information;
• solving conceptual problems;
• design;
• implementation;
• experimentation and evaluation;
• writing up.

Projects are intended to allow students to demonstrate their ability to organize and carry out a major piece of work. The relative amounts of time spent on the above areas will obviously vary. No project consists of just implementation or experimentation: much careful thought and planning is required in advance. Project topics span the range informatics, so that students can choose projects which they find useful and interesting, and goals are usually flexible so that students can work to the best of their ability.

Spreading project work over both semesters is more important than adhering to a detailed distribution of hours. The 4th Year Structure has three blocks of concentrated effort for the project - in weeks 1-5 of semester 1, weeks 11-13 of semester 1, and weeks 1-5 of semester 2. During these periods you should be spending much (for the weeks 1-5 blocks in both semesters) or all (weeks 11-13 of semester 1, week 11 of semester 2) of your time on the project. There may be some coursework deadlines in these periods, with few or none in weeks 11-13. However, you should make sure to keep your project going at a quieter level during the other periods of the semester, as steady progress is far more likely to result in a satisfactory project than erratic jumps. Students are encouraged to keep a log-book in which they record all work done on their project and the time spent.

Each student is assigned one (or occasionally two) supervisors, who not only provide technical advice, but also assist in planning the project. Students and supervisors should meet frequently and regularly, preferably each week during semester time.

Assessment

The project is assessed on the basis of a written project report submitted on the Wednesday of Week 12 of the second Semester. (Refer to the project calendar for the exact date.) You will also be required to submit your entire project directory, to provide background information in case it is necessary.

The report

The report should be around forty pages long (and preferably no longer than sixty pages) and 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. Such appendices do not contribute to the page count but they should not be excessively long.

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

It is perfectly acceptable, and indeed recommended, that you arrange for your supervisor to read and comment on a draft of the project report in advance of the deadline.

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.

Submitting THE Project 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.

The web form for project submission is now available at: https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/cgi-bin/submission_form_ug4.pl

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

In 2007/08, a new rule was introduced into Informatics, specifying that coursework will not be accepted late without good reason (good reason to be judged by the year organiser).

This rule does not cover the project, for the simple reason that only the Exam Board is allowed to judge "good reason" for a significant piece of work such as the project. If you do submit late (not recommended, as the penalty for this is high), we use the University "penalty" scheme. In certain cases, where evidence of special circumstances is presented to the Exam Board, the penalty might be waived.

• It is an essential feature of the project that the submission deadline be met. 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.

The report is read independently by the project supervisor and a second member of staff (and, in some cases, by others). It must contain all information relevant to the project since, in general, the readers will be unaware of the work undertaken, the difficulties encountered and the results obtained. The readers allocate a numerical mark after assessing the project work in terms of criteria such as:

BASIC CRITERIA

• Understanding of the problem
• Completion of the project⁽¹⁾
• Quality of the work
• Quality of the dissertation

ADDITIONAL CRITERIA

• Knowledge of the literature
• Critical evaluation of previous work
• Critical evaluation of own work
• Justification of the design decisions
• Solution of any conceptual problems
• Amount of work

EXCEPTIONAL CRITERIA

• Evidence of originality
• Inclusion of publishable material

Projects are marked according to the following classifications.

0-19: Bad Fail

The project is inadequate in all of the basic criteria. The student is deemed not to have duly performed the work of fourth year and cannot normally receive an Honours degree.

20-29: Clear Fail

The project is inadequate in more than one of the basic criteria, but not all. The student is deemed not to have duly performed the work of fourth year, and will not receive an Honours degree unless there are circumstances mitigating the failure in the project.

30-39: Marginal Fail

The project is inadequate in one of the basic criteria. The student will fail the project, but may yet pass overall.

40-49: III

The project is adequate on the basic criteria.

50-59: II.2

The project is at least average on all the basic criteria and is average on most of the additional criteria.

60-69: II.1

The project is at least good on the basic criteria and is at least average and sometimes good or excellent on the additional criteria.

70-79: Low I

The project is good or excellent on all the basic and additional criteria.

80-89: High I

The project is good or excellent on all the basic and additional criteria and also has elements of the exceptional criteria.

90-100: Outstanding I

The project is good or excellent on all the basic, additional and exceptional criteria, and has strong elements of the exceptional criteria.

Project materials

Students are strongly advised to use only supported software, be it programming languages, editors, graphics packages, windowing systems, etc. Where a project requires the purchase of materials of any form, including software, the necessary purchase should be negotiated in good time with the project supervisor and the projects organizer. On-line technical documentation can be found on the Computer Science web pages.

Progress documents

To provide a check on progress, and as preparation for writing the final report, students must submit two further documents during the year. These are:

• a one-page description of the project goals, in advance of the first project group meeting;
• a ten-page interim report on a description of the problem and your approach to its solution, and/or information you have acquired from background reading. You should take the opportunity to write this interim report such that it may be suitable for inclusion in your final report. Two copies of this report should be submitted to the ITO office by Friday 27th January.
  I'd expect about 4-5 pages on describing the project and its goals, about 3-4 pages on describing your approach, then about 1-2 pages on the timeline (what you have done already, when the rest of the project will be done). This layout will vary depending on the particular project ...
  In doing the timeline, remember you must plan to be finished system building by week 4 of semester 2 at the latest, to give time for evaluation and writing up.

The interim reports are scrutinized by the project supervisor, who supplies feedback as necessary.

Project group meetings

To further broaden involvement in projects, students are divided into small groups of between four and six people which meet regularly, with supervisors in attendance, to discuss progress. Project groups meet at three times in the year during the following:

• Week 4 of Semester 1;
• Week 11 of Semester 1;
• Week 6 of Semester 2.

Group meetings are also attended by all the respective supervisors and various members of the Project Committee, with one of the supervisors acting as group convener. At each meeting, each student gives a 15-minute talk describing progress on project work and future plans.

More detailed guidelines on the formats of the various talks will be circulated in advance of each meeting. Supervisors should assist their students in preparing for the meetings, and transmit further feedback to them afterwards. The purpose of this system is fourfold:

• to broaden involvement in the project through feedback from other staff and students;
• to monitor the progress of the project as a whole and identify problems at an early stage;
• to provide students with periodic opportunities to take stock of their progress;
• to develop students' presentational skills.

Any student whose progress, as perceived in the group meetings, gives cause for concern may be asked to give a further presentation to the Project Committee, with the supervisor in attendance. This permits a more thorough discussion of any problems which have arisen.

Project presentations

Finally, students give a 30-minute presentation of their project (including a practical demonstration where appropriate) 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 a demonstration of results and not just repetition of sections of the report. You may not require a computer to demonstrate your project but you should have some results to demonstrate your evaluation of your work.

Producing a project report

This section deals only with the technical aspects of producing a report. Please see the section on "Assessment" above for a description of its expected structure and contents.

While the project report should not be untidy, it is not fruitful to spend a large amount of time on word processing. The report's readers are mainly concerned with the technical quality of the content. Use of a spelling checker program is recommended.

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. See above for details of where to submit the report.

• Honours project report style: instructions and files

IPR, confidentiality

To be updated......

Intellectual Property in a venture is owned by the people or organisations who supply original ideas. Students are not employees of the University and they are marked in part for original input so ipso facto they will own at least some IPR of any creative project they are engaged in. This share will depend on who proposed the project and the degree of direction given to the student. If this is an issue, the student and supervisor or external organisation should sign an agreement prior to committing to the project. Where a formal agreement is required, the University can provide a document for this purpose which can be obtained from the Project Organiser on request. It may also be necessary to ask the student to sign a non-disclosure agreement if the student is privy to confidential information. Special restrictions or agreements may apply to sponsored students. The University must be informed of any restrictions being imposed on or agreed with the student and would veto any agreements that imposed some employment restrictions on students after graduation. Project reports cannot be copied to external organisations without the prior approval of the student in any case and may be restricted by agreement with any other owner of the IPR. In normal circumstances students will hold the IPR and will be asked to sign a declaration, on submitting their report, which will allow the University to copy the report on request. Although a student may own all or part of the IPR, nevertheless neither the student nor the University can publish or otherwise exploit the substance of the project without the permission and cooperation of the other party.

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Footnotes

(1) Completion

Note that "completion" covers achievement of the original objectives, achievement of modified objectives or providing convincing evidence that the objectives are unachievable.