Junior Seminar (CS580/INFM580) Assignment 01

Assigned : Monday 23 January 2023

Due : Monday 30 January 2023

Summary

Finding your interests can sometimes feel like finding stars in the mix of others, as shown in Figure 1; you know that they are out-there but sometimes, they are hard to find when you first start looking. The goal of this assignment is to help you identify where your interests lie in the area of computer science and then to get you started thinking about how you can combine those interests into a senior project proposal that will be exciting and rewarding.

What to do

You are invited to take a serious look at your past experiences in computer science and think about how you want to spend the next year and a half. Think about why you chose to major in computer science. What would you like to be able to say about your accomplishments at the end of four years? What do you imagine telling a potential employer about what you have learned and what you have done with that knowledge?

This assignment has two different components: written and presentation.

• Written: You have already taken the Survey of Interests using the Google form.

  • For Tuesday's work during class, your job is to re-read your answers from your survey form and to discuss them with a colleague in class. For each of your survey question responses, you are to justify or explain your answer in an effort to draw the idea to a more specific research idea. Your colleague is to ask you questions to help you focus your ideas. You are also to create a list of at least ten keywords for your research area. Record your updates in your reflection Markdown document (writing/reflection.md) along with your keywords. Switch roles. Begin working on your lightning talk for Lab time on Thursday.

  • For Thursday's work during class, you will revise your keywords as necessary as you dig into the scientific literature to find recent and relevant articles. You will be reading Abstracts to determine their importance to your research interests. You will be completing work on your lightning talk presentation for lab.

• Presentation: Prepare a short (four-minute, four-slide) lightning talk for Thursday in which you briefly describe a more specific part of your research interest. This insight will be the result of spending time browsing research articles from the scientific literature, and talking to your colleague in class. Very briefly in your talk, please introduce an important article into your short talk and explain why this article is important to your research interests. Remember you only have to touch on the broad themes of the article. Try to articulate why the article is relevant or meaningful to your research interests.

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Required Deliverables

• Tuesday:
  • Prepare an updated survey of interests to be completed in your Markdown File, writing/reflection.md.
  • Prepare a listing of keywords words for your work.
  • Give the name of your partner.
  • Begin preparing your slides for the slighting talk.
• Thursday Class:
  • Begin looking for articles using your keywords.
  • Finish your slides for the lightning talk for lab with the inclusion of the motivating article.
• Thursday Lab:
  • Deliver your four-minute lightning talk on your updated interests and introduce an important article to your work.

Checks for GatorGrader

For immediate feedback on submissions, we will be using Gator Grade to inform the of missing components in the submission. As you submit, you will notice that there is a thick red X that will change to a green check mark when all components have been included in the submission. You are encouraged to click on the red X to find a listing of the components to address.

Project Assessment

The grade that a student receives on this assignment will have the following components.

• GitHub Actions CI Build Status [up to 20%]:: For the lab01 repository associated with this assignment students will receive a checkmark grade if their last before-the-deadline build passes. This is only checking some baseline writing and commit requirements as well as correct running of the program. An additional reduction will given if the commit log shows a cluster of commits at the end clearly used just to pass this requirement. An addition reduction will also be given if there is no commit during lab work times. All other requirements are evaluated manually.

• Mastery of Technical Writing [up to 50%]:: Students will also receive a checkmark grade when the responses to the writing questions presented in the reflection.md reveal a proficiency of both writing skills and technical knowledge. To receive a checkmark grade, the submitted writing should have correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation in addition to following the rules of Markdown and providing conceptually and technically accurate answers.

• Presentation [up to 30%]: Students will receive a checkmark grade for presentations. Student must be present to receive credit for group's presentation.

GatorGrade

You can check the baseline writing and commit requirements for this lab assignment by running department's assignment checking gatorgrade tool. To use gatorgrade, you first need to make sure you have Python3 installed (type python --version to check). If you do not have Python installed, please see:

• Setting Up Python on Windows
• Python 3 Installation and Setup Guide
• How to Install Python 3 and Set Up a Local Programming Environment on Windows 10

Then, if you have not done so already, you need to install gatorgrade:

• First, install pipx
• Then, install gatorgrade with pipx install gatorgrade

Finally, you can run gatorgrade:

gatorgrade --config config/gatorgrade.yml

Seeking Assistance

• Extra resources for using markdown include;
  • Markdown Tidbits
  • Markdown Cheatsheet
• Do not forget to use the above git commands to push your work to the cloud for the instructor to grade your assignment. You can go to your GitHub repository using your browser to verify that your files have been submitted. Please see the TL’s or the instructor if you have any questions about assignment submission.

Students who have questions about this project outside of the lab time are invited to ask them in the course's Discord channel or during instructor's or TL's office hours.