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Essay

Graded essay

The purpose of this exercise is to give you training in scientific writing and an opportunity to think through how the contents of this course may be applied in a degree project. You will practice both writing in a popular science style and writing in a more scientific style. You will work with an old Bachelor’s Thesis in Computer Science.

Please check the "project number" column in rapp to see which thesis you have been assigned.
  1. Silverfish Simulation.
  2. Steganography – The art of hiding a message in plain sight.
  3. Spatial Data Handling in PostGIS.
  4. Automatic Wordfeud Playing Bot.
  5. Large-Scale Agent-Based Pedestrian and Crowd Simulation in Real-Time.
  6. Proposal for a Swedish Remote Electronic Voting System.
  7. Smart Scrabble Playing – Strategies and Their Impact.
  8. Learning Reverse Engineering.
  9. Robot Door Opening.
  10. Optimal Yahtzee – Strategies and heuristics.
  11. Analysis of the Client Puzzles Protocol.
  12. Finding Clusters of Similar Artists – Analysis of DBSCAN and K-Means Clustering.
  13. Algorithm Construction for GPGPU.
  14. Simulation of Pedestrian Behavior.
  15. Go, F#, and Erlang.
  16. DoS Mitigation using Proof of Work – An example utilizing the UDP protocol.
  17. Transparency with Deferred Shading.
  18. Sudoku Solvers – A different approach.
  19. Rendering a 3D City.
  20. Heart Rate Training using Sonification.
  21. Utilizing Particle Systems for Strand Animation.
  22. Music Information Retrieval – Automatic genre classification from acoustic features.
  23. Comparing Different Genetic Algorithms through Solving Steiner Networks.
  24. Heart Rate Sonification – using Sound to Monitor
  25. Net Voting.
  26. Optimal Yatzy Strategy.
  27. Geographical Tactical Voting in Swedish Parliament Elections.

 

Content and structure

The title of your essay is "What does a computer science degree project have to do with science?" and the intended readership is people interested in the second cycle education of Computer Science. The essay should be two or three pages, starting with the following abstract.

"The degree project used to be mainly proof of vocational skills, in particular programming, but recently the focus has shifted to scientific writing and methods. With an old project thesis as an example, we discuss how the new requirements may be met."

  1. Your essay should include an easily readable summary of the thesis intended for a lay-person who probably has no deep knowledge of computer science. You should give a brief explanation of what the thesis is about and a discussion of its possible interest for a general public. 
  2. Next comes a section with general scientific considerations that come to mind in connection with the project. It may include historical references such as Occam or Galileo, philosophical terms such as anti-realism or the HD-method, statistical concepts such as correlation or null hypothesis, CS themes such as P vs NP, ethical issues etc. Try to make as much use of the course contents as possible while staying relevant to the topic.
  3. In the final section, you return to the project and give some suggestions about how it might have been carried out and reported with the requirements of a Masters' thesis.  Anna-Karin Högfeldt at the ECE school has been kind enough to lend us the informal translations she uses in her course.

 

Formal requirements

  • Title page with your name, and the name of the Bachelor's Thesis under scrutiny.
  • Second page: Part 1 (Summary)
  • Third page: Part 2 (Scientific considerations)
  • Fourth page: Part 3 (Suggestions)
  • Font size 10pt
  • Your essay must be submitted to Canvas no later than January 12, 2018. Upload your file as a pdf on the Assignments page.

Grading

The grading is A-F according to the following criteria. A late essay will not get a higher grade than E.

E: The essay fulfills the formal requirements and is written in clear English in appropriate styles. The writer shows clear understanding of the thesis and the course basics.

C: The writer also gives comments that show broad knowledge in scientific methods and suggests relevant improvements.

A: In addition to the above: The summary is interesting and thought-provoking. Considerations and improvements show deep insight in the theory of science.

Peer review

You have the option of handing in your essay for peer review in peergrade before deadline. Handing in your essay for peer review is strongly recommended, but not compulsory.

Peer review questions for essay self evaluation.