Overview

In this zero credit “course”, you will work in teams to gain experience in conducting research and contributing to a research project. Although we will provide some course-like structure to help you along, how the course is run is open to change based on your feedback. Further, all of the projects are loosely structured, meaning we have identified high level steps and goals, however we rely on your creativity to fill in the gaps and direct where the project ends up going!

The goals of the course are for you to

• gain experience reading research papers
• work with a research code base
• direct a research project
• have an interesting and fun experience

Course Structure

The course is split into two “sections” based on which “umbrella” project you are working on (Khameleon or Precision Interfaces).

• Each section will meet one hour per week.
• The entire course (both sections) will meet together once every 2 weeks so everyone can interact.
• The staff will have office hours for addition discussions that teams may have.
• We will use slack as the primary way to communicate – create channels for teams, chit chat, etc

Section Meetings

During the first part of the course, teams in each section will work on warm-up tasks to become acquainted with their respective codebases and research projects. The meeting during each section will focus on reading and understanding the umbrella project’s papers, sharing progress, comparing notes, and learning about the code base. This part is about 3 weeks.

After the warmup part, each team will begin to focus on their specific summer projects. The section meeting will be devoted to sharing updates about each team’s progress, helping troubleshoot issues, and planning next steps

For each meeting, every team will prepare a short presentation (max 5 slides) to share

• What the team’s goals were and what has been achieved
• Interesting things (parts of the code, a bug, a paper, a related product) that your team has learned
• The team’s next steps
• Demos, screenshots, storyboards are great!

Section Agendas

The section meeting agendas can be found here:

• Khameleon Agendas
• Precision Interface Agendas
• Template for Section Updates

Schedule

Week 1

• Section meeting: Introduce everyone, course overview and project overviews.
• Tasks: teams work on warmup tasks and read papers

Week 2

• Section meeting:
  • Teams present a section/component of the paper
  • Teams present their progress on the warm up and share how they think things fit together.
• Course-wide Meeting:
  • Teams introduce themselves, share what they’ve been up to
  • Open discussion
• Tasks: warmup

Week 3:

• Section meeting:
  • Continue paper discussion
  • Teams present their progress on the warm up, and share what they’ve learned and how they think things fit together.
  • Teams present their initial plans for their summer projects
• Tasks: finished warmup

Week 4

• Section meeting:
  • Teams shift to presenting progress on summer projects
• Course-wide Meeting:
  • Teams present their warmups

Week 5 and Beyond

• Section meeting:
  • TBA
• Course-wide Meeting (bi-weekly):
  • TBA