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Essay

Graded essay

The goal of this essay 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 writing both in a popular science style and in a more scientific style. Your work will be based on an old Bachelor’s Thesis in Computer Science.

  1. Your essay should begin with 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 the general public. 
  2. Next comes a section with general scientific considerations that come to mind in connection with the thesis. This may include historical references, philosophical terms such as anti-realism or the HD-method, statistical concepts such as correlation or null hypothesis, CS themes such as P vs NP, ethical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, arguments etc. Try to make as much use of the course content as possible while staying relevant to the topic.
  3. In the final section, you will give some suggestions about how the thesis work might have been carried out and reported with the requirements of a Masters' thesis.  Anna-Karin Högfeldt at the ITM school has been kind enough to lend us the informal translations she uses in her course.

Since the Bachelor's thesis was written a few years ago there may be new research in the area. Please find a relevant reference in addition to those cited in the Bachelor's thesis.

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
  • You will be asked to review the essays of two other students. You will also be required to review your own essay.

Dates

  • December 12 2018  -  January 8 2019 Peer review in Peergrade
    • You may hand in the preliminary version of your essay in Peergrade for peer review at any time between these dates. This will be a Live Session Links to an external site. so if you hand in earlier, you will receive earlier feedback. 
  • January 10, 2019 22:00 Final version in Canvas
    • Deadline for submitting the final version of your essay (after review)  in Canvas

 

Grading

Your essay will be graded according to the following criteria:

  • A late essay will not get a higher grade than E.
  • An essay that does not fulfill all criteria for pass will receive Fx.
  • An essay that in addition to the pass criteria also fulfills one or more of the "pass with distinction" criteria will get a higher grade than E (one grade higher for each criterion).

Pass: 

  • The essay fulfills the formal requirements,
  • and is written in clear English in appropriate styles. 
  • The writer has summarized the thesis,
  • written about scientific considerations in connection with the thesis subject,
  • and suggested relevant improvements.

Pass with distinction:

  • Style and use of language are well adapted to purpose.
  • The summary is interesting and comprehensible for a lay-person.
  • Scientific considerations are clearly connected to the thesis and show broad knowledge of course content.
  • The writer also gives constructive suggestions for improvement,
  • and has found at least one new reference that supports these suggestions.

Essay subjects (Bachelor's theses)

Please choose your subject in this doodle Links to an external site. (will open on Monday 26 Nov 15:00). Links to theses below.

If you have signed up for a subject then you may start working on it

(once a subject is fully booked it will no longer be visible in the doodle).

 

  1. Net Voting – Designing an Online Voting System.
  2. A Comparison between Go and C++.
  3. Comparison between JSON and YAML for Data Serialization.
  4. Go: Examining Google's Hottest New Open Source Project.
  5. Self-Learning Alquerque Player.
  6. The Java Modeling Language – A study and an implementation of JML.
  7. A 19-Tone Scale Synthesizer.
  8. Analysis of Two Common Hidden Surface Removal Algorithms, Painter's Algorithm & Z-Buffering.
  9. A Genetic Algorithm in the Game Racetrack.
  10. Cognitive Authentication Schemes – Traditional password replacement?
  11. Native Code on Android – A performance comparison of Java and native C on Android.
  12. Applied Forced Alignment for Language Analysis.
  13. Q-Learning for a Simple Board Game.
  14. Evaluation of WebGoat.
  15. Inter-Language Analysis of POS-Tagging.
  16. Proof of Work.
  17. An Analysis on Operational Transforms.
  18. Self-Learning Artificial player.
  19. Peer reviewCognitive Authentication – Implementation and evaluation of an image-based authentication method.
  20. Analysis of SHA-3 candidates CubeHash and Keccak.
  21. How Profilers Can Aid Software Development.

Resources