Wednesday, January 7, 2009:

The class project teams can consist of no more than two students. Individual person teams are also welcome.
The students are welcome to submit their own project ideas in a form of 1-page proposal no later than January 21th. This gives you time to decide whether you are interested in choosing a project from the list or propose your own. The students will work on the projects requested upon the approval of the instructor. The students can either bring a hard copy of the project proposal to the instructor or send a link via email. Please do not send emails with file attachments.
Upto two teams can choose to work on the same class project.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009:

There will be two paper presentations per class starting from January 26th.
Each student will present total of two papers throughout the semester.
The schedule of the research papers are posted along with the presenters' names added at the end of the paper details.
There will be total of 5 formal paper critiques for the assignments. The papers required reviews and the review due dates are given in the paper schedule page.
Each student is required to have a secure web page where the paper and project presentation slides in addition to the paper critiques can be posted. The link to the web site should be emailed to the instructor once the page is set up. The instructor will visit the pages on the due dates. The instructor will post the paper presentation slides from the students web page in the class schedule page. While the presentation slides can be accessible by public, the reviews posted in the site should be secured and only known to the student and the instructor. If you make a password protection as an additional security measure, make sure to let the instructor know the password.

Here are the guidelines for the research paper presentations:

The presentations should be prepared in a chosen software tool, powerpoint, pdf, etc.
Each presentation is allotted 30 minutes talk time with 5-10 mins questions and answers session.
The firs slide of the presentation should contain the full citation of the paper being presented, the presenter's name, and other relevant information.
The presenters is expected to not only present the assigned paper, but also spend sometime on what he/she has thought of the paper (pros/cons and improvements if any) at the end of the presentation as part of the presentation slides and discussion.
The presenters are most welcome to research and refer to other related papers and include information from those papers in the presentation as long as proper citations are provided wherever possible.
If there are multiple papers are referred in the presentation, complete references (title, authors name, where published, month and year of publication, and page numbers) at the end of the presentation.

The students presenting papers in a given week must send the instructor the links for their presentation slides no later than two days prior to the presentation. In addition, the students must bring hard copies of the papers to be presented and the presentation slides at the beginning of the class. Double-sided copies are strongly recommended.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009:

EEL 6883 research paper critique suggestions:

The critique should be organized into distinct sections either by answering the five questions posed in the syllabus or combining the problem and proposed solution into a section called "summary", followed by "strengths", "weaknesses", and "suggested improvement" which correspond directly to those five questions.
Apart from summary section, the each point (stregths or weaknesses or improvements) in other sections should be separated either by using a bulleted or numbered list or simply starting with a new paragraph.
The weaknesses and the improvements sections are the most critical in which the review should focus on. The recommended suggestions must be sound and accompanied with motivation and reasoning behind it. The suggestions should be focused on the technical aspects of the paper rather than cosmetic details or readability, grammatical errors, etc.
In the recommended improvements section, the review should include the authors ideas for future extensions if any provided in the paper in addition to your own recommendations. These two subsections must be clearly separated.

Wednesday, February 12, 2009:

EEL 6883 project progress presentation requirements:

The project progress presentations should be 10-12 minutes per team. We should be able to accommodate all the teams if we start the class 10 minutes earlier and stay an extra 10 minutes at the end for that day only.
The order of the presentations will follow the order of the teams in ascending order (teams 1, 2, 3, etc.)
The hard copy of the presentations should be turned in to the instructor on the dat of the presentation, you can also post the slides in your web page.
The presentations are expected to cover the following: i) description of the project description (what is the problem statement?); ii) the progress made so far; iii) what else is left to complete?; iv) what is the plan to complete (including intermediate milestones, etc.); iv) difficulties encountered so far and any requests for suggestions from the instructor and the classmates?

Wednesday, April 1, 2009:

The deadline of the project report till April 24 (Friday) by 5pm instead of April 20th. This should give everyone extra few days to complete the report after the exam
The exam will be held on April 22nd in class and cover all the papers presented in the class. It will be open book, notes, (but closed computers or PDAs, etc).
The earlier presenters of the class projects may not have the complete project but the project presented closer to the end should have more percentage of completion in order to keep the fairness among the teams.