CIS 650 Project Options

I am generally amenable to most projects that are of reasonable scope. Many projects have the option of being done individually or in groups of 2. I believe that implementation projects are important because they allow us to actually evaluate ideas. (Theory projects may also be acceptable, but they are more hit-or-miss, so I generally advise against them.)

What is presented here is a sketch of project ideas. Your first assignment will be to pick a topic, perhaps find a partner, and do a bit of initial reading and thinking (and perhaps talking with me) about the problem. This will be due Wednesday 2/5.

Resources for Finding More Information

If you're looking to do a bit of background reading, there are two very important sites for finding research papers. From both, you can do searches by author or by title.

Note that PostgreSQL and MySQL are open-source databases that have versions for most platforms. The Tukwila system is not yet open-source, but I plan to release it under an open-source license in the near future. SHORE and Berkeley DB are storage systems that also have source code available.

Implementation Projects

Here are some suggested project topics. In all cases, you are expected to not only implement something, but to demonstrate that it works on some experimental workload:

For all implementation projects, a report (5-10 pages) describing the problem you are addressing, your motivations, the approach and implementation, and your contributions is required. Your paper should be structured much like a conference paper, with a short abstract, introduction, body, related work, and conclusion.

Survey and Analysis Paper Project

I am also willing to accept a survey and analysis paper as a term project. This paper should be approximately 15 pages and should be a survey of a research topic to which I agree, and it must analyze a minimum of 4 related papers. One such project is the following:

Advice on Writing


Zack Ives
Last modified: Fri Jan 31 11:25:08 EST 2003