SCM Exam and Report

Course objectives

The overall objective of the course is to give students a better understanding of what it means to be studying science. The focus is on the principles of doing research according to the empirical method and gaining practical experience in studying research topics. Concretely, each student will during the course document their exploration of scientific methods in general and moreover a specific advanced topic in artificial intelligence or software engineering.

The objectives of the course map directly to different aspects of the three reports that must be handed in:

1. mini project on searching for scientific literature
2. mini project on the empirical method
3. main project on literature survey and scientific methods

In more detail, the objectives of the course and their relation to the exam, are as follows:

• Independently find literature on a specific research topic: you will be given a practical course on searching scientific literature, search for literature in the first mini-project, and must yourself find literature for your final report.
• Orally present existing research: all students will de presentations of some topic covered by the final report.
• Write a survey covering a specific research topic: this survey is a significant part of your final report.
• Propose a systematic approach for validating a research result by experimenting or building simple prototypes: your final report must contain a theoretical section that discusses how to empirically verify one or more main results of the research papers covered by your survey. (Depending on the topic and the complexity, practical experiments are welcome but not required.)
• Show understanding of the fact, that different branches of science use different methodologies: your final report must discuss the methodology that is the basis for the research papers covered by your survey.
• Show understanding of the basics of the major methodologies: we focus on the empirical method in class, and your final report must discuss the research papers of your survey in relation to the empirical method.
• Be able to apply the correct methodology for their chosen topic: your final report must discuss scientific methods in general and empirical methods in particular in relation to the research papers of your survey.

In addition the course will cover a number of practical skills such as working in groups, writing documents in LaTeX, and using gnuplot to do exploratory statistical analysis.

Reports

Each of the three projects (mini 1 and 2, survey) are documented by a report. The two mini projects are documented by group reports whereas the final survey project is documented by an individual report. The topic of each report is presented on the projects page, here I only address the form.

Group reports must explicitly document who did what part of the work. First, the report must specify what group member did the major part of the work on/was responsible for each written part (section, paragraph, ...) of the report. Second, the report must in an appendix specify what percentage of the overall effort was spent by each group member, divided into a few meaningful categories. Third, the report must include a project log file listing when each person was working on the project.

Individual reports have no special requirements on documentation. Note however that all reports (group or individual) must be written independently. No two reports should contain the same pieces of text. Moreover, no reports should contain copy-pasted material that is not cited (copy-pasted material does not give you any credits, copy-pasting without citing is cheating). Blackboard contains an automatic system for detecting similarities between reports that are handed in and for detecting similarities between reports and text accessible on the internet (including databases with scientific papers).

Exam

You are graded based on an overall assessment of the reports documenting the three projects. Specifically, the three reports as a whole are evaluated according to the Danish 7-point marking scale with internal examiner. Evaluation is done with regards to the course objectives, above.

The mini projects are done in groups but must explicitly indicate who did what part of the project and who wrote what parts of the report and must moreover include a workload log (see above). A report for a mini project can optionally be done individually but must then include documentation for why the group could not produce a single document. In all cases the reports should be written independently, a group that has split due to disagreement and cannot figure out how to do this must see the teacher before handing in their assignment.

The survey report is an individual written report. You are allowed to collaborate on all aspects of the report, but the report must be written individually and must present your own interpretation of the surveyed papers, your own analysis and your own conclusions.

The curriculum will be made available on the literature web page (bottom). It is important to note that you are expected to demonstrate that you can make use of the material in the curriculum, not just reproduce the theory behind it.