Assignment 10: Final Paper

Due: Friday, December 13 at 5pm. Submit on Canvas

Summary

This is it! Finish and submit the research paper that you've been working on this quarter. You have all the tools; now it's about finishing what you started.

As a reminder, when you're done, you can work with your TA to submit your research to a non-archival track in a top conference in your field, and get a conference grant from VPUE to support up to $1,500 to travel to the conference and present it if it gets accepted.

Integrate new results and feedback

You've likely made a lot of progress since your draft paper. Go ahead and flesh out your Results, Discussion, and Conclusion sections. Use the outline for these sections that you drafted off your model paper, or revise that outline as needed. As a reminder:

  • Results: conveys the outcome of your evaluation, and interprets the results so the reader can understand what they should take away from the outcome.
  • Discussion: generally asks the "why?" questions. Explain: why did the results come out the way they did? What ended up mattering, and what didn't? What unforeseen outcomes arose, and why? In addition, lay out limitations: what can't your approach solve, and what questions can't your study answer? What does all this mean for future work in this space?
  • Conclusion: reiterate the problem, your idea, and the implications. Tie it up with a bow, and ride off into the sunset.

You've also received peer review feedback as well as feedback from your TA. Integrate these into your final submission. This feedback will likely involve minor or major revisions to your introduction, related work, approach, or other sections.

Include a brief changelog (no more than a few paragraphs) that details the major changes you made between your draft submission and final submission.

"What if it fails?" Sometimes, the results don't come out the way that you'd hope. That's an expected — and even important — part of science. Report the negative results, and unpack for us why you think it didn't turn out the way you hoped. I often tell my graduate students: "If we knew for sure that it would work, it wouldn't be research." In the case of negative results, we will evaluate your final paper based on your effectiveness at unpacking the reasons why the idea didn't play out in the way that your thesis expected it to. You are welcome to do follow-up work if you have bandwidth.

Submit your final paper in the format specified by your section. Total word length should be 4000-5000 words, not including references.

Complete the team feedback form

Generally, teams work constructively together to complete projects. It's important for us to know whether this is the case in your project. In the case of substantially imbalanced contribution, we will adjust participation grades to compensate.

So we can understand this, each member of the team needs to fill out the team feedback form by the paper deadline. We will not return grades to your team until every team member has submitted the form.

Fill out the form here.

Submission

Submit a PDF to Canvas containing (1) your final paper, (2) your changelog, (3) a link to your Overleaf document, and (4) any code you wrote for this paper. This code could be a link to the colab, a link to a github repository, analysis scripts, etc. This is a group assignment; create a group for your team, and one member should submit on behalf of the group.

In addition, all team members must individually submit the team feedback form.

Grading

Your final paper will be graded on the following rubric:

  • Thesis and bit flip: is there a clear research question and idea that makes a significant addition to your research area? (7pt)
  • Execution: has the thesis been explored thoroughly through the approach being pursued? (7pt)
  • Evaluation: has the thesis been tested convincingly? (7pt)
  • Clarity: is the writing overall clear and easy to follow for a technical expert in the field? (5pt)
  • Related work: does the paper cover major points of related work, and explain how this research extends them? (5pt)

If the paper is over or under the word limit, the project will lose 10% credit. Being appropriately pithy is a skill!