SIGMM Education Column

Project work is an important component of any graduate-level Multimedia course. SIGMM Education Column of this issue highlights the types of projects that are offered by Prof. Tat-Seng Chua and Prof. Mohan Kankanhalli in their co-lectured course, CS5342 Multimedia Computing and Applications, at National University of Singapore.

In general, the project can of any one of these two types:

1. Implementation Project:
   • In this type of project, students are required to search for recent multimedia related papers to pick one (or few) papers which need to be understood, analyzed, implemented (and hopefully improved).
   • To obtain the highest grade, students are expected to develop their own novel idea as an improvement/extension over the existing work.
   • The end result of this project is usually a proper, working prototype of the idea in the paper(s).
2. Survey Paper Project:
   • Students choose a specific topic to do the survey in this kind of project.
   • The end result is generally a very technical survey paper like the ones appearing in ACM Computing Surveys journal.
   • For the highest grade, it is considered necessary to propose some novel algorithm/technique or do an implementation of several techniques for a proper comparison.

Other characteristics of the project work are:

• Projects are usually flexible, carried through the term. But each project needs to have some theoretical/algorithmic component and an implementation part.
• Typical projects attempt to improve some state-of-the-art technique or algorithm.
• There are three stages of evaluation -- initial proposal which is iteratively refined, interim report, final report + demo-with-presentation. The final presentation is open to all.
• Many people use it to investigate some part of their thesis research work and others use it as an opportunity to investigate a totally new area.