6.897: Advanced Data Structures (Spring'05)

Prof. Erik Demaine     TA: Mihai Patrascu

A file with the abstracts of all student projects.

The project is the most imporant component of the course. It can take several forms:

• Bring a theoretical contribution to the field (solve a problem, formulate an interesting open problem or conjecture, etc).
• Implement a data structure, and describe a set of experiments, and/or how to tune its practical efficiency.
• Survey a few papers on a related topic.

You are encouraged to relate the final project to your research interests, and you will not be limited to the topics discussed in class. The open problems session is another good source for project ideas.

Project Proposals:

You must submit a project proposal by Friday, April 22. When submitting project proposals, use the normal mechanism for submitting problem sets. The proposal should be about one page long (not more than two). It should discuss the problem you chose in a clear and specific way.

We decide whether to approve your project's theme based on the proposal, so it is imperative that you do some serious thinking about the project before writing the proposal. Even though you should not change the topic of the project after submitting a proposal, you may change the form of the project (such as writing a survey if you fail in bringing a theoretical contribution).

Policies:

• The project write-up may be done individually or in pairs. As always in research, you are allowed and encouraged to consult with anybody, including the teaching staff.
• You must hand in a paper on the last day of classes (May 12), which should be on the order of 10 pages.
• You are also required to do a presentation during the last two lectures (May 10 or 12).