CSC 545 Fall 2014: Graduate Student Project

Topic selection- Wed. Sept. 24.

CSC 545 students will each choose an optimization technique. On Wednesday Sept. 24 at the beginning of class, each graduate student will draw a number that determines the order in which the students can select one of these topics. Each topic can be chosen by at most 3 students. The optimization techniques:

  1. Ant Colony algorithms
  2. Genetic algorithms
  3. Hill Climbing (Random restart)/Iterated Greedy Algorithm
  4. Neural Networks
  5. Simulated annealing
  6. Tabu Search
  7. Approximation Algorithms (if more than 18 students)

Survey Paper- due on Fri. Oct. 17 at 11:55pm, worth 10% of your mark.

Late submissions accepted until Tues. Oct. 21 at 11:55pm with a 10% late penalty.

Your survey paper should be written using LaTeX.
Please click here to see some sample LaTeX.
Put your name on the paper but DO NOT include your student ID number. Upload at least three files to connex (.tex, .bib and .pdf), plus any other files used to create your paper (e.g. pictures). Use your name as part of the file names. For example, I might upload:

  1. Wendy_Myrvold.tex (my survey paper)
  2. Wendy_Myrvold.bib (my references for the topic, possibly including a small number related to the topic that you decide to not reference in your paper).
  3. Wendy_Myrvold.pdf (what I get after typesetting)
  4. Wendy_Myrvold_8dodec.eps (a picture I use in the paper).

You should write your paper in your own words. Copying and pasting sentences or paragraphs that someone else has written is plagiarism and will be penalized with a mark of 0 on this project. Extreme cases (copying large blocks of text) could be penalized with a failure in the class. It is OK to use standard definitions. But otherwise, if you copy a phrase or sentence it should be in quotes and attributed to the original author. If you restate the ideas of another author in your own words, you should reference the author but quotes are not required.

Conferences and journals vary widely in terms of the quality of their submissions. One place you can find ratings of them is:

  1. Journal papers in computer science
  2. Conference papers in computer science
    Search page for conference papers.
For full credit, at least half of your references should be from A or A* journals and at least one quarter from B or higher. In your .bib file, include a notes field for each paper indicating its quality as per this list. For example:
note= {Quality A*.},
or for journals or conferences not indexed:
note= {Quality unranked.},

  1. [10] Define your optimization technique.
  2. [10] Provide one example of a small problem that is being solved with this tactic. If you borrow an example from a text book or a paper, make sure you include a reference to your source.
  3. [20] Give precise descriptions of four different types of problems/applications for where this problem solving tactic has been applied. For each one, include one journal/conference paper reference.
  4. [40] Find at least 8 papers that use the problem solving tactic. Please choose reputable journal and conference papers. You can refer to wiki items and things you find on the web but these will not count as one of your 8 surveyed items. Include a paragraph or two describing the contents of each of these papers.
  5. [10] When does this tactic work well and when do other tactics do better? Find papers with comparisons to some of our other tactics.
  6. [10] What area are you interested in with respect to doing research (for a thesis or a project)? Are there any applications of this tactic related to your research area? If there are no applications, choose some related area of interest to you and describe how the tactic is applied there. Note: if you have not decided yet, then just choose some research area that you might be interested in working on for this part of your paper.