Project Information

The term project is an important part of this course. Projects can be conducted individually, or in teams of up to three students. There are three types of projects that are acceptable in this course:

1. Research projects: Pick a research problem related to the topic of the course and work on it; or a research problem from some other area (your area!) with a cloud computing twist to it.
2. Survey projects: Write a survey about some topic in cloud computing. The expectation for survey projects is higher than for research projects, since the risk is lower. Furthermore, since the area is fairly young, I expect it will be difficult to find enough material to support a good survey.
3. Case study projects: Do a case study about database management or data intensive computing in cloud environments. For example, you could implement some data intensive application using Hadoop and study its performance. Or you could compare some of the proposed cloud data manipulation languages. For this kind of project, I expect you to have a working demo at the end of the term.

Successful projects could lead to publishable results. Obviously, publishing is not a requirement, but this is the mindset that you should have.

Project Ideas

You will need to form your team and come up with a project idea in the first month of the term. I strongly encourage you to come up with your own project ideas. Choose some open question from the papers on the reading list. Or pick a problem that interests you from outside of databases and give it a cloud computing twist. I will try to help by presenting some possible directions for projects in class.

Timeline

• 14 October: One page project proposal due.
• 26 November: Project presentations in class.
• 17 December: Project report due.

Project Proposal

The project proposal should be one page long in 10 point font. It should include the title of the project, names of the team members, a description of the problem you will work on, why it is important, and how you will attempt to solve it. Try to clearly identify your objectives, methodology, milestones, and metrics for success.

Project Report

The project report should be written in research paper style. It should motivate your problem, discuss related work, and present your solution in detail including its benefits and limitations. The report should be 10 pages maximum (20 pages for survey projects). It should be formatted in the two-column ACM proceedings format, using one of the ACM SIG Proceedings Templates. The ACM templates include headings for "Categories and Subject Descriptors," "General Terms," and "Keywords." You do not need to use any of these headings.

Deliverables

• Project report in hard copy and PDF.

• Source code and scripts required to replicate your solution.

• 30 minute presentation.

• Demo if applicable.

Evaluation

You will be evaluated on the depth and novelty of your work, on the quality of your report, and on your research methodology (problem definition, choosing the correct level of abstraction, cleanness of  implementation, experimentation methodology, etc.).