Your proposal should answer Heilmeier's questions (all 9 of them; see list below); if you think a question is not very relevant, briefly explain why. In other words, your proposal should describe what you plan to do (the problem to address), why you want to do it, how you will do it (what tools? e.g., SQLite, PostgreSQL, Hadoop, Kinect, iPad, etc.), how your approach is better than the state of the art, why it may succeed, and when it does, what differences will it make, how you will measure success, how long it's gonna take, etc.
What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
How is it done today; what are the limits of current practice?
What's new in your approach? Why will it be successful?
Who cares?
If you're successful, what difference and impact will it make, and how do you measure them (e.g., via user studies, experiments, ground truth data, etc.)?
What are the risks and payoffs?
How much will it cost?
How long will it take?
What are the midterm and final "exams" to check for success? How will progress be measured?
Your proposal document must be no more than 2 letter-size pages long, excluding references. In other words, only the references do NOT count towards the page limit; everything else — including the literature survey — counts. Use at least 1-inch margin for each page (top, right, bottom, left). It must use 11pt font (or larger). The document must be in PDF format. You may create the document using any software that you want; we highly recommend using LaTeX (see below for example LaTeX template). Include any figures, charts, tables, captions, etc. whenever useful — they count towards the page limit (they may include text whose font size is smaller than 11pt, but such text must be legible). Your document should be self-contained. For example, do not just say: "We plan to implement Smith's Foo-Tree data structure [Smith86], and we will study its performance." Instead, you should briefly review the key ideas in the references, and describe clearly the alternatives that you will be examining.
Grading scheme & Submission instructions
[60%] Literature survey
Your literature survey should have at least 3 papers or book chapters per group member (outside of any required reading for the class).
Short papers, like PNAS, Nature, Science papers, count as 0.5.
Copying the abstract of the papers is obviously prohibited, constituting plagiarism.
For each paper, describe
(a) the main idea,
(b) why (or why not) it will be useful for your project, and
(c) its potential shortcomings, that you will try to improve upon.
You may use any citation style (e.g., APA, Chicago). Google Scholar supports a wide range of citation styles; it also provides BibTeX (needed if your team is using LaTeX).
Make sure to cite your references in your literature survey.
The literature survey can be in its own section, or be integrated into the answers of relevant Heilmeier questions (e.g., #2 and #3).
[30%] Expected innovations
[10%] Plan of activities
Using either a Gantt chart (example) or a table, describe
the activities each member has done and will do; and
each activity’s start and end time (or start time and duration).
[-5% if not included] Provide a statement that summarizes the distribution of team members’ effort. The summary statement can be as simple as "all team members have contributed a similar amount of effort". Place this statement immediately after the Gantt chart (or table). If effort distribution is too uneven, we may assign higher scores to members who have contributed more.
[-5%] For every Heilmeier question that's not mentioned.
Some teams organize their proposals based on the Heilmeier questions (e.g., each section addresses one question). Some teams organize theirs using section headings from the final report (e.g., “introduction”, “survey”). The exact organization is up to you, provided that your answers to the Heilmeier questions are easy for us to spot.
Team's contact person submits a softcopy, named teamXXXproposal.pdf, via Canvas (i.e., that person submits for the whole team), where XXX is the team number (e.g., team001proposal.pdf for team 1).
jschulberg
commented
1 year ago
Project Proposal
Your proposal should answer Heilmeier's questions (all 9 of them; see list below); if you think a question is not very relevant, briefly explain why. In other words, your proposal should describe what you plan to do (the problem to address), why you want to do it, how you will do it (what tools? e.g., SQLite, PostgreSQL, Hadoop, Kinect, iPad, etc.), how your approach is better than the state of the art, why it may succeed, and when it does, what differences will it make, how you will measure success, how long it's gonna take, etc.
9 Heilmeier questions (source)
Your proposal document must be no more than 2 letter-size pages long, excluding references. In other words, only the references do NOT count towards the page limit; everything else — including the literature survey — counts. Use at least 1-inch margin for each page (top, right, bottom, left). It must use 11pt font (or larger). The document must be in PDF format. You may create the document using any software that you want; we highly recommend using LaTeX (see below for example LaTeX template). Include any figures, charts, tables, captions, etc. whenever useful — they count towards the page limit (they may include text whose font size is smaller than 11pt, but such text must be legible). Your document should be self-contained. For example, do not just say: "We plan to implement Smith's Foo-Tree data structure [Smith86], and we will study its performance." Instead, you should briefly review the key ideas in the references, and describe clearly the alternatives that you will be examining.
Grading scheme & Submission instructions
[60%] Literature survey
Your literature survey should have at least 3 papers or book chapters per group member (outside of any required reading for the class).
Short papers, like PNAS, Nature, Science papers, count as 0.5.
Copying the abstract of the papers is obviously prohibited, constituting plagiarism.
For each paper, describe
You may use any citation style (e.g., APA, Chicago). Google Scholar supports a wide range of citation styles; it also provides BibTeX (needed if your team is using LaTeX).
Make sure to cite your references in your literature survey.
The literature survey can be in its own section, or be integrated into the answers of relevant Heilmeier questions (e.g., #2 and #3).
[30%] Expected innovations
[10%] Plan of activities
Using either a Gantt chart (example) or a table, describe the activities each member has done and will do; and each activity’s start and end time (or start time and duration).
[-5%] For every Heilmeier question that's not mentioned.
Some teams organize their proposals based on the Heilmeier questions (e.g., each section addresses one question). Some teams organize theirs using section headings from the final report (e.g., “introduction”, “survey”). The exact organization is up to you, provided that your answers to the Heilmeier questions are easy for us to spot. Team's contact person submits a softcopy, named teamXXXproposal.pdf, via Canvas (i.e., that person submits for the whole team), where XXX is the team number (e.g., team001proposal.pdf for team 1).