600/610: Senior Thesis Starter for Fall 2023 and Spring 2024

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Overview
• Requirements
• Explanation
  • Introduction
  • Related Works
  • Method of Approach
  • Experiments
  • Conclusion
• Tagging
• Updates
• Problems
• Assistance

Introduction

This repository contains the starter for the Senior Thesis document. This document compiles using GitHub Actions; students should write the entirety of their document using the abstract.md and thesis.md files. The template contains more specific details about using the template. The remainder of this README overview the project's requirements and the process of publishing the document via GitHub Actions.

Overview

This assignment requires a researcher to write a Markdown and LaTeX document, stored in this README and in the file thesis.md that describes the key aspects of a senior thesis research project. Please refer to the source code in this file for an explanation of the components of a senior thesis and the way in which you create them in Markdown and/or LaTeX.

Your course instructor will reduce a researcher's grade for this assignment if the PDF of your completed thesis document has not been properly released before the assignment's due date as specified in the GitHub Classroom page when you accept this assignment. Unless you provide the course instructors with documentation of the extenuating circumstances that you are facing, no late work will be considered towards your grade for this project.

Requirements

For specific details about the general evaluation rubric for minimum requirements please refer to the following list for the entire senior thesis. Please note that your senior thesis chapters in CMPSC 600 will be evaluated according to the content that you submit in that course and your senior thesis chapters in CMPSC 610 will be evaluated according to all of the following baseline requirements. This means that a student's work for CMPSC 600 will not be evaluated according to requirements that they could not yet fulfill until the completion of their senior thesis. For instance, the requirement that "The thesis consists of at least 7500 words" applies to a student's work in CMPSC 610 and not CMPSC 600. Finally, please note that these are only baseline requirements and it is expected that an exceptional senior thesis will exceed these requirements.

• General Thesis Requirements
  • The abstract provides a concise and compelling summary of the research
  • The thesis was submitted on time as a PDF in a tagged release on GitHub
  • The GitHub repository of the thesis contains evidence of many commits
  • The GitHub repository of the thesis contains multiple releases using the Semantic Versioning Standard
    • The GitHub repository of the thesis has a passing build status in GitHub Actions
  • In adherence to the Semantic Versioning Standard, the GitHub repository of the thesis contains a release greater than 1.0.0 for the work in CMPSC/INFM 600 and a release greater than 2.0.0 for CMPSC/INFM 610
  • The thesis has the correct format created through the use of Pandoc and LaTeX and the senior thesis template for the Department of Computer and Information Science
  • The title of the thesis is both interesting and appropriate
  • The thesis includes at least twelve references
  • Unless there is a convincing reason to require otherwise, each chapter in the senior thesis should contain at least ten to twenty pages of contents formatted in the required style
  • The thesis consists of at least 7500 words
  • The thesis follows a logical flow at the level of chapters, sections, subsections, and individual paragraphs
  • The thesis includes appropriate visual aids, which fall under the broad categories of:
  • image
  • figure
  • table
  • graph
  • The thesis highlights and explains the societal impacts and ethical implications of the completed research
  • There are no typographical or grammatical errors in the thesis
  • There is no extraneous text in the thesis

Students are required to write two chapters of their thesis document. These chapters can include any two of the following:

• Introduction Section Requirements

  • The introduction section clearly describes the completed work
  • The introduction section motivates the completed work from a professional perspective
  • The introduction section outlines the ethical implications of the thesis

• Related Work Section Requirements

  • The related work section references and describes relevant literature
  • The related work section explains how relevant literature connects to the thesis
  • The related work section does not provide a "laundry list" of the related literature
  • The related work section situates the completed project in the broader scope

• Method Section Requirements

  • The method section explains the process utilized in the completed study
  • The method section addresses as many of the necessary methodology used in the research project. For example, the following may be relevant to the project:
  • description of algorithms
  • programming languages
  • libraries
  • platforms
  • software tools
  • hardware
  • The method section references the GitHub repository that contains the project's artifact(s)
  • The method section, when appropriate, explains how to run the computational artifact (note that the README.md file of the GitHub repository that contains the computational artifact(s) should furnish complete details about the input, output, behavior, and use of the project as necessary)

Experimental Results Section Requirements

• The experimental results section includes a description of experiments such that a reader should be able to reproduce them
• The evaluation subsection describes how the work is validated
• The evaluation subsection contains at least one graph, table of data, or some other relevant presentation of the results from the experimental study
• The experimental results section details threats to validity

Discussion and Future Work Section Requirements

• The discussion and future work section discusses the impact of the completed research project
• The discussion and future work section critically reflects on the completed research project
• The conclusion outlines, with sufficient depth and detail, avenues for further and/or future work

Explanation

Please consult the following sub-sections, as section requirements may have changed from requirements in previous years. All descriptions of each section are delimited by the understanding that sections should "include, but not be limited to" the areas highlighted. It is also important to note that students may, with the consent of their both their first and second readers, modify the structure of their senior thesis so that it includes, for instance, different chapters or different ordering of chapters. With that said, the final senior thesis that a student submits must still meet all of these baseline requirements.

Also keep in mind that the typical instruction to

whenever possible, use and describe one or more concrete examples and technical diagrams

applies across all relevant sections listed below.

A final note about requirements: nearly all of the sections requests some discussion of ethical implications inherent in projects. The ways in which ethical issues impact research will vary from project to project. Your first and second readers will be able to guide you on a project-by-project basis toward responding to the ethics requirements listed below.

Introduction

• a statement of the problem addressed in this research
• overall project aims
• background motivating your research
• a high-level overview of ethical issues implied by the current state of the problem underlying the work

Related Works

• the review of relevant existing work (i.e., the "literature review")
• the literature review should be a concise, scholarly review of the literature explaining the background to the proposed research
• the review should provide the context for the aims of the research in relation to existing work on the topic
• the literature review should place the senior thesis research in the context of the relevant existing work
• review of ethical discussions referenced in the Introduction

Method of Approach

• describes the infrastructure and tools implemented to serve, test, and support research and conduct experiments
• enumerates the general processes and code used by the project with required technical content that would include, for instance, diagrams and/or code snippets and/or algorithm statements
• addresses the interventions that the research incorporates or develops to address ethical concerns in datasets, software processes, or theoretical approaches

Experiments

• displays and discusses evaluative metrics and data used as validation strategies the projects
• clearly defines thresholds for success, and discusses the outcomes of experiments relative to them
• explores the trade-offs evident in the experimental results, leverage previously defined metrics about, for instance, efficiency and/or effectiveness
• uses techniques such as statistics and/or data visualizations to highlight the key trends in the experimental results
• discusses any threats to validity that remain from the original summary of the research or those introduced by any approaches or data used in the these research and implementation process

Conclusion

• provides a summary of your research and experimental outcomes
• proposes, where applicable, future areas of work or research indicated by the conclusion of this research
• includes an evidence- or results-based appraisal of ethical issues left unresolved or created by this research

Tagging

Since this repository primarily contains Markdown and/or LaTeX source code, the GitHub Actions configuration for it will compile the source code and automatically release a PDF of the main file whenever the last commit is associated with a Git Tag.

This will build a PDF file available in the "Releases" listing for this repository. All release numbers for your writing in this repository should adhere to the Semantic Versioning standard expected of GitHub projects. Here this means that:

• Major version releases feature a tag number change reflecting full releases; generally these start at 1.0.0
• Minor version releases indicate small changes or additions to documents; typically these increment the second digit in the version (e.g. 1.1.0)

Please note that your readers will only read the PDF generated from "tagged" releases of the file SeniorThesis.pdf that has a version number greater than 1.0.0.

That is:

• if your commit is tagged SeniorThesis-chompers-1.0.0, then
• the file SeniorThesis.pdf should be available for download in the "Releases" tab in your GitHub repository for this project under the name SeniorThesis-chompers-1.0.0.

To ensure you can create a release appropriately, make a single small change to the thesis.md and:

1. commit your file changes using a git commit command
2. create your first tag for this repository: type git tag senior_thesis-YOUR_USERNAME-0.1.0.
3. You are now ready to push your changes with the tag number using git push -u origin main --tags

The above steps should build a version of your project and release it on GitHub! If something does not work correctly, please contact your first and second readers and/or the senior thesis faculty coordindator to explain the details of the challenges that you faced. It is also important to note that it is possible for a student to perform a manual release of the PDF of their senior thesis chapters. Again, please communicate with your first and/or second readers and/or the senior thesis faculty coordindator for more information about the steps you would take to perform a manual release. With that said, it is important to stress that you should learn how to perform an automated release of your thesis in PDF and only use the manual approach if there is a severe and extenuating circumstance (e.g., GitHub Actions stops working for a short time) that prevents you from performing an automated release.

When you make subsequent changes to your files and perform commits and you are ready to release a new version of SeniorThesis.pdf, then you should again tag your work before a push command with a tag that adheres to the Semantic Versioning standard.

Each time that you correctly execute this sequence of commands you will release a new version of your document to GitHub that is easily accessible as a PDF to you and to your first and second readers.

After creating the log/ and output/ directories in your project directory, you should be able to locally build your senior thesis using the command pandoc --defaults pdf.yaml --to latex --metadata-file config.yaml --lua-filter .filters/abstract-to-meta.lua --template template/thesis.tex. Please note that you must run this command from the root directory of the project after installing both the pandoc and tectonic packages. If the build of your senior thesis works correctly then the local file will be available in the output/ directory. With that said, it is important to note that you should never commit the SeniorThesis.pdf file in the output/ directory to your GitHub repository! Since PDF files are "derived" from the source code in your GitHub repository, they should never be committed to it. Instead, you should rely on GitHub Actions to create a copy of your SeniorThesis.pdf file by following the previously described steps for making a tagged release.

Assistance

If you are having trouble completing any part of this project, then please talk with your first reader. In particular, if you have questions about your research project, please see your first reader. Alternatively, you may ask questions in the Discord server for this course.