15-464 Assignments
Initial Assignment
Your initial assignment is to select a paper to present for your
in-class presentation. Please email me your top 5 choices, in rank
order. Detailed instructions and pointers to useful websites are
here.
Programming Assignments
This course will involve two programming assignments and a final
project of your own design.
Please make sure that the TA and the instructor know if you
choose to do any group projects.
Part of the deliverable for each assignment is a report, which can
consist of a presentation or a web site. In your report you should
cover the following:
- Goals. What were you trying to achieve in the animations
you created?
- Techniques. What approaches did you use? There is no need
to review material that was required for the project, but
briefly describe extensions beyond the required
aspects of the animation, portions of the assignment you decided to do
differently, tips and tricks that you uncovered /
invented along the way, etc. Another way to think of it is that
you should (briefly) discuss any aspects of the
technical design and implementation of the project that you
think would be interesting to the rest of the class.
- Results. Show and discuss the animations you created.
- Observations. This is the space for your own thoughts on
the project. Were there aspects of the project that you found
especially easy or difficult? If you worked with both motion
captured and keyframed data, what differences were there in
trying to achieve certain effects? What would you do
differently next time? What more would you do if you had more
time to work on the project? What did you like and not like
about it? You don't have to answer all of these questions, of
course, but they are just to get you started thinking about what
to say here.
After each assignment has been handed in, a random set of students
will be chosen to present their work. You will use the report you
handed in as supporting visual material for this presentation.
Paper Presentation
In addition to the projects, you will be required to present one
recent research paper during the course of the semester. You will
have 10 minutes for your presentation. You may bring your own laptop
or coordinate with the TA borrow a laptop for the presentation. In
your presentatation, please cover the following points. In general,
you should be able to do this with just 4-8 slides. You will be asked
to turn in your presentation material in the same manner in which you
turn in your programming assignments.
- Introduction / Motivation. What are the authors trying to do and
why is it interesting and important?
- Techniques. Very briefly describe how the authors tackle
this problem.
- Results. Show the results. Often, this section will amount to
showing the video provided by the authors. Be careful in
timing your presentation, because if you show the entire
video, this may take up to half of your 10 minutes. You may
choose to let the authors describe the results in their own
words or turn off the sound and narrate yourself to make
specific points.
- Discussion. In this section you should give your own
opinion based on your study of the paper. Be sure to leave at
least a minute or two for this section. Here are some
questions to think about. Are the authors trying to solve an
interesting problem in the first place? How good a job did
they do? Are the results useful? To whom? What would we
learn if we were to read this paper in detail? What might you
change or how might you solve this problem in a better way?
Where do you expect the field to go from here, i.e., what
important problems didn't the authors solve?
Don't limit yourself to these questions -- just use them as a
starting point to organize your own thoughts about the paper.
Final Projects
Some information and suggestions on the final project can be found at the following web site. This web site may change to keep it up to date with items we have discussed in the course.