Syllabus for CSC 590-W18: Thesis Seminar                        

General                                        

Class Schedule: Tue 8:40 - 9:30 am, Rm. 14-232B

Professor: Franz J. Kurfess

Office: Building 14, room 218 Phone: 756-7179

Office hours: Tue/Thu 4:10 - 5:00 pm, Wed 2:10 - 5:00 pm

Email: fkurfess@calpoly.edu

Course Description

This is a 1-hour graduate seminar designed to aid M.S. students in conducting their research and preparing and delivering their thesis document.                                

The main course objectives are:

• To learn what is involved in writing a thesis.
• To learn how to do research.
• To learn how to present research: orally and in writing.                                

Grading Scheme                                

• Thesis reading and critique (15%)
• Presentations

• Short (5%)
• Long (30%)

• Writing assignments

• Thesis intro 15%
• Experimental design 10%
• Related work 20%

• Participation (5% of final grade)                                                        

Schedule

Follow the link to the schedule for the lectures and assignments; it is subject to change, especially if more student presentations need to be accommodated.                                

Assignments

The course involves three types of assignments: reading assignments, writing assignments and oral presentations.                                        

Reading Assignments:                                        

There will be two key reading assignments in the course.

• Thesis reading and critique: M.S. thesis documents from past Cal Poly M.S. students are available through the Cal Poly Library Digital Commons. You will select a couple of these documents, read them, and present your critique of one of the theses.
• Relevant literature: you will be asked to prepare a bibliography of academic literature relevant to your thesis topic. You are expected to read a number of papers from your bibliography, which will be the basis for a writing assignment in this class. And of course it will also be useful for your overall thesis work to be familiar with the relevant literature.         

Writing Assignments                        

The course will have the following writing assignments:

• Thesis Intro: you will write a succinct introduction to your research area. This introduction should provide an overview of the broad research area within which you are conducting your thesis research and should motivate your specific thesis research. As such, this text can be viewed as a draft of your thesis introduction section.        
• Experimental design: you will come up with a validation framework for your thesis (creative part of the assignment) and present a short write-up describing it (writing part of the assignment). This can eventually become part of the Validation section of your thesis.
• Background/Related Work: based on your bibliography of related work you will provide a write-up detailing the background information relevant to your thesis research topic. This may later morph into the Related Work or Background sections of your thesis.

Oral Presentation Assignments

You will formally deliver two presentations in this course:

• Short presentation: A short (up to 5 mins) presentation describing the essence of your thesis research in terms accessible to your peers.
• Long(er) presentation: A longer (15-20 mins) presentation describing your thesis research in more technical terms. This may serve as a prototype of your eventual thesis presentation.        

Other Assignments                                        

There may be other assignments in the course:

• M.S. Defense attendance. If any M.S. defenses are scheduled this quarter, we will attend them (ideally, I’d want everyone to attend 1-2 defenses).
• Research talks by visiting researchers. You may be asked to attend various talks and to summarize and critique them.
• Peer reviews. Some class activities may involve peer reviews of material produced by others (e.g., past theses) or by other students in the course(e.g., their wiki submissions).

Policies 

Class Attendance, Late Work and Extensions

Students are expected to attend all lecture and lab sessions for the class. Except for unforeseeable reasons like illness or accidents, I expect advance notice for anticipated absences and delays in submission of class work.

To maintain uniformity across the student population, I am following university guidelines and will consider the following “excusable” reasons for allowing students to make up missed work and absences:

1. Illness with a doctor’s statement
2. Serious illness or death of close relatives
3. Active participation in university events (an instructor may require a statement from the adviser involved certifying that the student was actively participating in a recognized university event)
4. Field trips
5. Religious holidays
6. Selective service and military reasons;
7. NCAA athletic competitions
8. Instructionally Related Activities (IRA)/competitions
9. Jury duty or any other legally required court appearances
10. Job or internship interviews

Much of the graded work in this class depends strongly on presentations and documentation material. Once a team or individual has committed to a date for the presentation, extensions or changes in the dates will only be permitted for the reasons listed above. Such changes may also have to be coordinated with the project contacts at the outside partner.

Students with Disabilities

It is University policy to provide, on a flexible and individualized basis, reasonable accommodations to students who have disabilities that may affect their ability to participate in course activities or to meet course requirements. Students with disabilities are encouraged to contact their instructor to discuss their individual needs for accommodations. If you have a disability for which you are or may be requesting an accommodation, you are encouraged to contact both your instructor and the Disability Resource Center, Building 124, Room 119, at (805) 756-1395, as early as possible in the term.

Academic Dishonesty and Cheating

The expectations below are based on Cal Poly’s Code of Student Conduct.

Academic dishonesty, in particular plagiarism, can be a serious offense. Any instances of cheating or plagiarism may be reported to the department chair and the Office of Student Rights & Responsibilities (OSRR). The Cal Poly rules and policies are listed in the Cal Poly catalog as well as at the OSRR web site. If the rules are unclear or you are unsure of how they apply, ask the instructor beforehand.

For programming assignments, we may use programs or services like Moss to compare assignments within a section, across all current sections of this class, and with old assignments. While such programs are not perfect, they detect suspicious similarities even after replacement of variable names and other identifiers. In general, the use of program libraries is acceptable, but not if they provide functionality whose implementation is the purpose of the lab or assignment. If you use libraries you need to indicate this in the documentation.

Turning in work is presumed to be a claim of authorship unless explicitly stated otherwise. For work created by multiple persons (such as team projects or group presentations), I may ask for documentation on who is responsible for which parts or aspects of the work.