Dear Students:
The following are the requirements for your class project.
1. You should inform me about the project topic by March 15th. Along with the topic, please also give an abstract (20 lines or less) about what you will study as a part of your project.
2. You should meet with me at least two times, once to discuss the tasks for the project, and once to discuss your preparation for the presentation.
3. You have to write a 6-10 page report discussing your work. A guideline for the report is as follows.
A. What is the problem you are looking at? Why is it important?
B. What are the currently known techniques for the problem?
C. What is the application of probability here? You can discuss the techniques in your own words, but the material itself can be drawn from prior research work.
D. What did you do to test/validate/improve on existing work on this problem?
E. Conclusion. Here you can make a statement about the suitability of existing techniques, and what you learnt from the project.
F. List of references. I expect to see at least five, if not more relevant references.
4) You have to give a presentation in class. A rough outline for the presentation could be as follows.
First explain the problem and its importance. For example, you could start off with "look at the prevalence of disease X in the world, it affects 20% of the people, we really need to stop it. Now I am going to talk about stopping disease X". Give some data here if possible to get the listeners interested. If you are working on an abstract problem, then you can describe the beauty/fundamental nature of the problem, so that we all start paying attention. For example, you could say "I will talk about Solving Diophantine equations. Here is an example of a Diophantine equation.. It is a basic problem, which
appears in X Y Z scenarios.. And it has been studied for ... years." Basically, whatever it is that attracted you to this problem, you should convey to the audience. Usually, a precise problem statement should appear at the end of this section.
Now is a good time for an outline of the talk. You could have a punchline saying "at the end of this presentation, you will know about the following...".
Next, describe the solution that you have studied. Be as precise as possible given the time limit. Define any variables, tools that you are using. Give time to describe the intuition. Define every symbol that you use on the slide.
As much as possible, have one idea per slide. This will help to focus the content. Needless to say, have as many pictures as possible, especially in describing the solution and the intuition.
Next present your work. If you are implementing an algorithm, describe the difficulties you found/anticipate in the implementation.
Conclusion/recap.
