EURECOM Semester Projects

Hey! We are looking forward to work together on a semester project. But every semester we need to follow 6 to 10 students, and we need your collaboration to make sure everything proceeds flawlessly. This page discusses how we usually organize things and some notes. Ping me if you have questions!

First steps

• TODO for you: create an account on gitlab.eurecom.fr and let us know what's your account username.
• TODO for us: we will create a gitlab repository where you can commit code / notes, etc.
• TODO for us: we will create an account on mattermost (chat system) and have a dedicated channel. We will invite you there.
• TODO for us: we will create a google doc where you can dump ideas, brainstorm ideas, etc. We will share it with you (and we will put the link as the subject of the mattermost channel).
• TODO for us: we will start a "log email thread". See below.
• TODO for you: please remind us if we didn't do our TODOs :-)

Organization

• We would like to have an update on the progress once a week. Please write us a (very short) "log" email (just a couple of sentences are OK) with what happened during the week. If you were too busy with other stuff, that's fine, we understand. But please write us "We were busy with other stuff, we didn't have time for the project". Again, that's OK.
• Please send us this "log" email by 1pm every Monday of the week.
• Other notes about this "log" email: we are going to start a "log email" thread for your project: please always reply all to this email thread for the weekly log and please let's use this email thread ONLY for this task, so that it doesn't get too messy.
• If you are stuck or you don't know what to do, ping us. For super quick question, you can trying pinging us on mattermost. If that doesn't work, send us an email. If needed, we can always set up a meeting and discuss in person. We are here to help.
• When writing an email, always CC all of your advisors/co-advisors (including the PhD students that help us out) and your colleagues, if any.

Additional Notes

• Final presentation. At the end of the semester, you will need to "defend" the project with an oral presentation (target for 25 minutes if you work independently, or 45 minutes if your work in two). If applicable, it would be great to have some demo.

• Report. Some projects may require a report. For these projects, the report needs to clearly show what is your contribution with respect to the state of the art. Cite relevant work. I don't want a report that's long and boring, it's better if it's short, to the point (i.e., don't fill with useless text to meet the page requirement, there is no page requirement, just an indication). Note that not all projects require a report: if you write a super awesome tool, we will ask you to write a bit of documentation so that we can use it, and we can of course consider this documentation as a report. That being said, some projects start in one direction and they end up in another ones -- so things may change during the semester. It is your responsibility to make sure we are on the same page.

• Code. If you wrote some code, make sure there is a small how-to explaining how to use it (e.g., compile, install, run the demo). This will make it possible for other people to reuse it.

• Independence. A big part of the grade will be about how independently you worked. So, always try to come up with possible ideas on how to proceed and on what you would like to work on. We can then of course help making sure these ideas are reasonable, but we always appreciate when there is an active contribution on your side. Ideally, we would like to use these semester projects to give you a glimpse on what it means to be independent researchers.

• Grade. To assign the final grade, we keep a lot of things into account (quality of work, independence, disappearance factor, etc.). If you disappear and do everything the last week of the semester because you are panicking, it's not going to fly (and with that I mean that you will not pass the project). We also know that, for some students, this is a 6-credit project, while for others is a 12-credit project: don't worry, we know about this and we of course keep this into account.

• Meetings. If a meeting is at 11am, it's at 11am. It's not at 1120am, and it's not at 1040am. The fact that I'm in the office does not imply that I'm free (or that the your co-advisors are free). Please stick to the established time.

• Cheating and Plagiarism. I have zero tolerance on cheating and plagiarism. I'm happy to invest my time to help you out and to work with you. In exchange I request that you don't use dirty tricks. If you have unexpected problems, come talk to me and we'll figure something out. Remember that copying text from another document without clearly marking it as a quotation is called plagiarism and is not acceptable. This will in general lead to a failing grade of the project and could lead to disciplinary measures (it has happened in the past. Beware that I'm checking that).

The most important rule

Folks, this is YOUR project, not ours. If you decide to discard the rules above and you disappear, that's fine. Our lives still go on. We will not chase you down and make sure you follow them — this is not asilo nido. But if you want to make sure there are not bad surprises, keep us informed, don't disappear, and when you are in doubt on what to do, ask us. For example, it's on you to ask us what you are supposed to do (in terms of presentation content/length, report, etc.). We are advising many students each semester, do not expect we are able to keep track of "we have already told student X about this". Again, when in doubt, ask.

In general, it's on you to convince us you did enough and why we should give you a good grade. It's not about us trying to find good reasons to give you a good grade.