Term Project Proposals

Please read first general information about term projects.

Presenting Your Proposal

We highly encourage to discuss ideas of your term project with the instructor during office hours. See the course calendar for the deadline for such a meeting. Please remember that there is limited time during office hours and there will be other groups wanting to discuss their project ideas with the instructor. As a result, office hours just before term project proposal presentations tend to get overbooked and each group has very little time to get feedback on their ideas. We recommend discussing your project ideas with the instructor in advance, rather than right before the proposal deadline.

Your team will present the proposal during class (see the course calendar for the specific day). The main objective of the presentation is to explain the key points of the proposal and to receive feedback on it from your classmates and the teaching staff. Additional details about proposal presentations:

  • The teaching staff will announce one week in advance the amount of time that teams will have for presenting their proposals. Usually, it’s between 5 and 10 minutes.
  • You can choose any means and ways of presenting. While no mark will be given for presenting the proposal, your objective is to clearly explain answers to the same questions as the ones your submitted proposal will answer (see below for the questions).
  • Anyone from your team can present the proposal. Solo and group presentations are allowed.
  • Feel free to share your screen if the presentations are done online.

Writing and Submitting Your Proposal

Your team is to submit a written proposal for the project with an initial bibliography. Submitting a written proposal gives the teaching stuff a chance to review and approve your project proposal, and to suggest references that you may have overlooked.

Attention: Submit your project proposal in PDF only. Proposals in any other formats will be discarded. Only first two pages will be read. References don’t count towards the page limit. Spelling, grammar, and other language errors will result in fewer points credited to the proposal. Format your proposal and references in using ACM Proceedings format (LaTeX, MS Word) in single column. Feel free to use project report and template (in LaTeX or MS-Word).

It is advisable to get going early. You are also encouraged to arrange a short meeting with the course staff to discuss what you want to do for the project. The deadline for such a meeting is specified in the course calendar.

Questions to Answer In the Proposal

The following are the questions that your project proposal (both presented and submitted) should address in brief. Please make sure to use separate paragraph in your proposal (and a separate slide in your proposal presentation) to address/answer each question. Feel free to use the question itself as the slide title or as an opening of your paragraph.

For a design project:

First, read more about design projects.

  1. What is the problem we are going to address?
  2. Why is this problem important?
  3. How is this problem currently addressed by others?
  4. What is the way we are proposing to address the problem?
  5. Why and in what respect is our way to address
    this problem is going to be better than those developed by others?
  6. What kind of prototype of the approach will you implement and how will you evaluate your approach using that prototype? Your evaluation should be tied into the claimed benefits/advantages of your approach over the existing ones.
  7. What is our plan for completing the project and submitting the report by the deadline (see the course calendar)?

For an analysis project:

First, read more about security analysis projects.

  1. What is the system that is going to be analyzed?
  2. Why is security analysis of this systems important? (Explain it in terms of value of the assets, threats, and risks).
  3. Who else did perform similar analysis or analyzed similar systems and how will your analysis be similar and different from those?
  4. What is the method of your analysis? Explain here exactly how you will be analyzing the system.
  5. Make sure to include in your submitted proposal the project authorization form signed by all the required parties. If the system owner or the course professor did not provide signatures, include corresponding e-mail messages from them.
  6. Why will the world be a better place after your analysis. That is, how is your analysis going to be beneficial to the society?
  7. What is our plan for completing the project and submitting the report by the deadline (see the course calendar)?

For an implementation project:

First, read more about implementation projects.

  1. What is the system for which we will be implementing a new function/feature?
  2. What is the function/feature we are going to implement?
  3. Why is this function/feature important in the context of the overall system?
  4. What is the way we are proposing to implement this function/feature?
  5. What’s the evidence that the system owner/developer is interested in incorporating our implementation in the system?
  6. What is our plan for completing the term paper and submitting it by the deadline (see the course calendar)?

Notes:

  1. Use past tense, as if you have already completed your projects, since you will have to use past tense for your final report.
  2. For analysis projects, please make sure to attach the authorization form signed by the system owner to your report (it does not count towards the page limit).