The first deliverable is a proposal.
For the first deliverable in your case study (ECE 7420) or project (ENGI 9823), please write a proposal detailing what you would like to study or investigate. The best case studies and projects are on topics of your own choosing, but I’ve also posted a list of topic ideas to help get your creative juices flowing.
The proposal should fill no more than one page, and it should be submitted as a PDF to Gradescope. The proposal should contain the following elements:
- Title
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A clear and engaging title for your case study or project. This should be appropriately formatted and free of grammatical errors. It should not contain citations.
- Topic
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A paragraph or two that clearly describes what will be explored or investigated in the case study or project. This description should contain specific details as well as references to appropriate background information that would be required for another student in this course to understand your topic.
- References
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At least two references from reputable sources on which you base your investigation. There must be at least one high-quality reference (book, journal paper, conference paper, etc.), and all references should be cited in a well-known citation format (ACM, APA, IEEE, etc.). Bare URLs are not acceptable.
Depending on your case study or project, it may be necessary to reference materials from sources such as blog posts. For example, a case study of an attack against a specific product may need to reference corporate blog posts from the product’s vendor. Wherever possible, however, durable references — i.e., references that someone will still be able to look up 50 years from now — are preferred.
For this deliverable, the use of GAI is not permitted. If you want to bounce creative topic and title ideas around, talk with your partner and with me. If you need to find facts or references about your topic, that’s just about the worst thing you could do with GAI: LLMs are good at sounding plausible, not being factually correct (don’t be these guys!).