Project Milestone 2
Progress Update 1
Due: Mar. 16, 2022 11:59:59 PM
Graded: Mar. 23, 2022
Percentage of Grade: 6%
Assignment Description: Finalized
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In this milestone you will provide a status update as to how your final project has progressed. This status update should be in the form of a LaTeX document that is updated from project milestone 1. I am expecting that you will copy any necessary files from milestone 1 and insert them in this project milestone; this form of self-plagiarism is allowed. Thus, the base repository I have provided for you is empty, but I am expecting you to populate it with files similar to what you submitted for P1
Objectives
In this milestone we are:
- Reporting on our progress with the project
- Creating artifacts of our progress on the project, e.g., task abstractions, design sketches, interview data, survey from content, code, writing
- Discussing any changes, deviations, or deficiencies since the proposal.
- Placing all of this in a LaTeX document
Instructions
You have two required components for this assignment: (1) completing a progress update write-up document and (2) preparing a update presentation. I describe each of these separately.
Progress Update Write-Up (due Mar 16 at 11:59:59 PM)
This document should be written in the IEEE TVCG Journal Track Format and present a number of required elements. Likely by this stage you are closer to 3-4 pages of material, depending on the status of your project. There is neither a minimum nor maximum length at this stage (whereas there will be a maximum length for the final report).
Many of the sections from the project proposal can be re-used. Some sections can also be removed at this stage if they are not relevant to final report of the work. The tone of the document should be switched from language that sounds like a proposal to language that clearly distinguishes work that is completed from work that is pending. As this is a status report, please delineate the status where appropriate (i.e. planned items vs completed items).
- Project title, abstract, and introduction should be included (you may remove any information regarding your personal expertise, your motivations should be scientific at this stage and not require a description of the personnel).
- Language here might be switched from aspirational/future tense (“We will show…”) to more precise present tense (“We show…”)
- While I don’t expect much to have changed, be careful to discuss any significant changes in the problem and motivation.
- Related Work
- Discuss the work related to your project, including both visualization and domain-specific references to the problem you’re focusing on.
- While it would be helpful for this section to be entirely completed at this point, it is OK if it is only partially complete. Please note in your plans if additional related work is forthcoming. Regardless, unless your proposal included a complete related work section (unlikely), my expectation is that this section will have been updated significantly.
- Background
- This section should answer the question “What does someone unfamiliar with the area need to know to understand this project?”
- Like with related work, this section may not be completed yet, but should be converging. as you begin to work out the details. This is an opportunity to look at what you are planning to write in your methods / results and do a “dependency check” to make sure the paper is as self-contained as possible.
- Methods
- This section should clearly outline the methods you have employed as well as separately describe what you have not yet employed. At this stage, there may still be numerous uncertainties, particularly if you are not finished implementing or if you have experimental approaches that need to be refined.
- Report on all aspects of the methods that you have used since the proposal. Likely, some of these will be elided as you converge on your final research goal, but for now you can think of this as journalling your efforts.
- What are the current barriers for success and/or risks? If there critical resources (data, code, elements) that you are still missing, make clear what there are and how you will acquire them moving forward.
- You should return to your evaluation described in your proposal and give a clear update on whether or not the project is on track to be successful (and, if a different evaluation mechanism is to be deployed, describe it here).
- Preliminary Results
- At this stage, you results still might be very “preliminary”, but a successful progress update needs to clearly report on what you have accomplished since the proposal phase.
- For example, you could include any screenshots from your preliminary implementations visualizations as well as any quantitative results that would be relevant.
- If code is an artifact of your research project, then this section should include sufficient information as to how to run your code. If applicable, feel free to create a separate subdirectory in the github repository and include the code and/or sample data. Do not submit very large data files in git.
- Preliminary evaluation of these results may not yet be appropriate, but you may want to include any informal observations at this stage.
- Timeline
- Review the concrete milestones you set out in the proposal. Which of these are achieved? Are you ahead of, or behind, schedule? How has the plan changed?
- It may be helpful to present this section by first repeating the original timeline and the adding a new subsection that explicitly summarizes and changes or deviations from your proposal and explains the reasons for these changes.
- Discussion / Impact
- As you may have a better understanding of the impacts at this stage, you might be able to flesh this out better. Or, minimally, discuss how they have changed in light of preliminary work.
Consider the above document as an opportunity to keep yourself accountable for making progress towards your project, as well as a crosscheck to ensure that you are on track towards completion. You can also use this exercise to flesh out portions of your final project document as well as to identify areas where you need to invest more time. Now that we’ve had more repetition with reading visualization research papers, you may want to consider how your document compares to a more “typical” visualization research paper.
Progress Update Presentation (presented in class on Mar. 14)
Your progress updated presentation should briefly describe the status of your project to the entire class. Presentations are required to be 2-3 minutes, followed by an anticipated 4-5 minutes of class discussion. These time limits are firm: presentations that go beyond 3 minutes will be cut off by the instructor and penalized in grading.
Slides are required and other visuals may be used. The main purpose of this presentation is to give a brief update of any major changes in the plan and solicit feedback on critical concerns. Like with your proposal pitch, you should present your research idea in a way that maximizes the ability to make connections with (and solicit feedback from) your classmates and instructor.
This is the earlier of the two checkpoints, and thus gathering input from the class as a whole is an opportunity to make any course corrections.
In the event that unforeseen circumstances prevent you from attending class in person, the instructor will consider options for pre-recorded presentations.
Submission
You should use git to submit all source code files for your (1) write-up and (2) a copy of your presentation slides. The expectation for this and future assignments is any work you submit will be graded by cloning your repo.
You should submit your progress update as a .pdf file named update1.pdf. In addition, you must submit all .tex files and anything necessary to build them (images, .cls files, etc.). I will grade whatever is submitted in the .pdf, but these other files will be used for cross-checking the work.
Grading
Deductions
| Requirement | Value | ||
Submitting the update write-up (due Mar 16 at 11:59:59 PM)
| 3 | ||
Presenting the progress update (in class on Mar. 14)
| 3 | ||
| Total | 6/6 | ||
Cumulative Relationship to Final Grade
Worth 6% of your final grade