1. Pick a topic. Examples of topics used in previous years are listed at the bottom of this file; these should give a pretty good idea of the range of possibilities open to you. Try to find a topic that will be of interest to your peers, that is related to the course, and which is not already old hat to your audience. If in doubt, talk to me.
2. Submit--via email to the class list (and no less than three days before your presentation)--a formal memo explaining what your proposed topic is, the scope of the coverage you expect to provide, and why the topic should be of interest to the class. Use as a model the notices of lectures sent out by the Computer Science department. Your group's memo should be about one page long.
3. Make a presentation on your assigned day. The presentation should last approximately five minutes per group member (so a four-person group should use around twenty minutes). Experience has shown that groups often use more time than this; within limits, this is not a problem. Visual aids are encouraged, but not absolutely required. (An in-focus machine will be available for all groups to use. You do not need to make special arrangements to reserve it.) Do what you feel you need to do to put on a professional, educational, and interesting talk.
4. Submit a short paper--roughly three pages--that summarizes your main
points. This is a single paper from the group, not a paper from each member of
the group. The (fictional) audience for this paper is someone who was
supposed to fly in from Chicago to listen to your presentation but got
stuck in the airport instead. S/he wants to know the highlights, not all
the details. The paper is due within one week of the presentation.
Grading
Groups will be awarded a pool of points to divide up among
the individual members. To make the numbers easy to follow, assume a
five-person group received 80 points (out of a possible 100=5 x 20
max/person). The five people could decide that everyone gets 16 points,
or they could decide to give 20 points to each of four members and one
person zero points (or pretty much any other arrangement the group comes
up with). However, no person can be given more than 20 points (or less
than zero--sorry), and all group members must agree to the chosen
distribution of points. In case of disputes, I will act as both judge and
jury. In truly exceptional circumstances I will dispense with the above
grading system and assign grades directly.
Topics from the recent past
The following topics were used (successfully) in the recent past. They
are listed here to give you a few ideas of the type of topics you might
want to consider; your group is by no means restricted to the ideas below.
1. The trend towards implanting computers in people (cyborgs).
2. Recent experiments in on-line voting.
3. A look at the Microsoft court case.
4. E-commerce (why you might want to try it...and why not).
5. Distributed systems (with special attention to SETI and RC5).
6. EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence).
7. Hackers--what every system administrator should know.