:index:`Project` ################################################### ECE 537 will include a group final project. Final project groups should usually include three people. The final project will be graded based on three things: a proposal, a presentation, and a report. Proposal (20%) ---------------- The final project proposal will be submitted one week after exam 1. It should be about three pages, including: * Proposal title * Names of the people in your group * The main article or articles on which you plan to base your project * Key technological innovation that you want to focus on. This may be a new training criterion, or a new signal processing algorithm, or some other cool innovation. It need not be your own innovation; it can be something recently proposed by other authors that you want to test in ECE 537. * Datasets you plan to use * Include a formula defining the evaluation criterion(a). Define all terms. * Baselines against which your work will be compared. Are any of them code that you can download and test yourself, or will you need to compare against the numbers in somebody else's paper? * Proposed ablation study(ies) * What open-source code do you plan to use? * Proposed division of labor: what code will be written by each person in your group? Presentation (30%) ------------------------ Presentations will be after Thanksgiving break. Each group will get up to 20 minutes for presentation, and up to 5 minutes for questions. Each member of the group should give about one third of the presentation. Presentation should be similar to a conference presentation, i.e., it should include: * Task description: what problem are you trying to solve? Why is it interesting? This part should be general enough to be understood by other students in ECE 537, but need not be more general than that. * Key technological innovation that you want listeners to focus on. This may be a new training criterion, or a new signal processing algorithm, or some other cool innovation. It need not be your own innovation; it can be something recently proposed by other authors that you want to test in ECE 537. * Evaluation condition: dataset(s), evaluation criterion(a), and baseline(s). If your project includes multiple evaluation conditions, your presentation may include all of them, but doesn't need to; given the time available, include whichever conditions will be most interesting to other students in ECE 537. * Discussion. This part of the presentation may be an ablation study, or a visualization, or some other item of discussion that increases the level of understanding of the audience. * Conclusion. This should be one slide (or at most two slides) summarizing the most important point of your presentation. Report (50%) ---------------- Due dates for final project reports will be decided based on final exam schedules; it will have to be some time before grades are due. The final project report should be six to twelve pages, including the following: * Proposal title * Names of the people in your group * Motivation. Describe the problem you're trying to solve. Describe the current state of the art for this problem, including (if possible) at least three recent papers that have attempted to do something similar. Discuss what worked, and what didn't work. * Background. What knowledge is necessary to understand your key technological innovation that is not universally known within the speech technology community? Give citations for papers that provide the necessary background knowledge, and provide a brief summary of their content, sufficient for the reader to understand your key technological innovation. * Key technological innovation that you want the reader to focus on. This may be a new training criterion, or a new signal processing algorithm, or some other cool innovation. It need not be your own invention; it can be something invented by other people. * Datasets. Describe the content of each dataset in terms of the quantity of data, and the types of labels available for each datum, and the types of overall metadata available. Give the source of each dataset, and specify the license agreement of each dataset (open-source or not; if so, which one; if not, key terms). * Include a formula defining the evaluation criterion(a). Define all terms. * Baselines against which your work is compared. Specify which baselines you ran yourself, and which ones are numbers published in a paper. Describe (possibly in words, possibly in formulas or both) key differences in the algorithms between your main algorithm and the baselines. * Numerical results: one or more tables showing evaluation criterion(a) comparing your primary approach to the baselines. * Ablation study(ies): describe what configuration variables or hyperparameters were modified or ablated in each ablation study, and exactly how this was done. Show the results. Specify, in words, exactly what was learned from each ablation study. * Discussion. Describe, in words and/or visualizations, a scientific generalization that is implied by your results and/or your ablation study. * Conclusion. State the most important numerical difference in the evaluation criterion between your primary approach and the baseline(s) and/or ablation condition(s). State the main reason why you believe that difference occurred. * Statement of contributions. Describe, in words, which portion of the code was downloaded (and from what site), and which portion was written by each of your team members. Specify which portion of the final report had its initial draft written by each of your team members. It is assumed that initial drafts are rewritten, revised, and/or checked by all three team members.