CS 598: Project

Spring 2019

Deadlines

1. 1/18 Fri 23:59pm (End of Week 1): Form project group
   
   • send me an email about your group.

2. 2/1 Fri 23:59pm (End of Week 3): Submit project proposal
   
   • You are expected to have a well-defined research problem and feasible solutions.
   • You are expected to show the feasibility by concrete examples, datasets, and tools for system building.
   • I encourage you try me the idea before deciding on the project.
   • You will be presenting your proposal in class at 2/5 and 2/7.

3. 3/3 Sun 23:59pm (End of Week 7): Submit Checkpoint 1 report
   
   • You are expected to show your system/tool prototype and preliminary results.
   • Your prototypes should be able to work with your motivating examples.
   • You will be presenting your Checkpoint 1 in class at 3/5 and 3/7.

4. 4/5 Fri 23:59pm (End of Week 11): Submit Checkpoint 2 report
   
   • At this point, you are expected to build your system/tool and start evaluation.
   • You are expected to describe the detailed evaluation plan in your report.
   • You will be presenting your Checkpoint 2 in class at 4/9 and 4/11.

5. 4/25 and 4/30 (in class): Final project demo (15 min)

6. 5/1 Fri 23:59pm: Submit final project report (6 pages max)
   

Reports and Code

Submission: Submit your reports and code to me via email.

Proposal: Your project proposal should describe what you plan to do, why it is interesting, how you plan to do it, and what you are not sure about. Also describe what resources you think you will need to carry out the project (e.g., VMs, datasets). The end product of the proposal is a crisp problem statement and a feasibility study based on concrete examples and datasets. The proposal contributes to 2% of your final score.

Checkpoint reports: Please see the Deadline section for what you should include in your checkpoint reports. The checkpoint reports do not need to be formal (you can use Google docs). However, checkpoint reports do contribute to 8% of your final score (3% and 5% for Checkpoint 1 and 2, respectively).

Final paper: Your final paper should be written like a research paper you read in class. The report should be no longer than 6 pages.

Code: You can host your code at GitHub or BitBucket, and send me the link. It is ok if you want to keep your code confidential, but please talk to me explicitly.

Paper/report format: Please format you reports and papers with the new USENIX paper template (2019 conferences).

Project Ideas

The projects could be (but not limited to) one of the following forms:

• Conduct an empirical study of a special type of reliability issues that occurred in real-world system deployments.
• Build a tool or a method that systematically uncovers reliability issues of existing software or system configurations.
• Measure certain reliability aspects of a special type of software or system configurations.