In this class, you will form a team of 2-3 students to work on a single research project throughout the semester. The project should aim to solve a real problem in the intersection area of machine learning and security/privacy/system/networking. For this project, your goal should be producing publishable research results at a high-quality venue. You are welcome to incorporate this project with any other research you are working on as long as the topic is related. I encourage you to think about new solutions that ML can facilitate to problems in your own field. For a given team, all the team members will receive the same score for the project related tasks. Please talk about your idea with me (briefly after class or via appointment) before starting the project.
In the first 3 weeks, you will be forming a team and write a 1-page proposal. 1-page is the recommended length, but you can go as long as 2 pages. You can use MS Word or Latex (single column, Times New Roman, font size 11 or 12). The proposal should clearly describe the research problem, why the problem is interesting/important and novel, how you plan to approach the problem and some key related works. If your project requires related datasets, please also describe how you plan to collect the data. You can use existing datasets collected by other researchers as long as the source is properly cited. At the end of the proposal, you should include a rough timeline and key milestones for the project.
Our midterm will be a short in-class presentation to talk about your project to your classmates. The talk should describe your idea, your progress so far and the plan for the next step. This will be a good opportunity to get feedback from your peers and me.
The final talk will be a more complete and extended version of the midterm talk. You will need to briefly remind everyone about your project and the key idea and report your research results.
You will write a 6-page paper on your findings due at the end of the semester. You can have an unlimited number of pages for references. In your report, you should describe the research problem, background material, your contributions, evaluation (experiments and/or analysis), and conclusions. The final paper should have the usual structure of a research paper. 1) Abstract: no longer than two paragraphs describing the research problem and your findings/contributions. 2) Introduction: describes the motivation, the problem you are addressing, your approach, and your contributions. 3) The main body of the paper should describe your technical approaches in detail, your experimental setup and the evaluation results. 4) Your paper must include a section for related work. 5) The paper should end with a conclusion that summarizes your contributions and discusses open problems.
For the project report, please use Latex to write your paper. The recommended style is the ACM Latex template acmart. Please use the two-column conference style (sigconf). For new Latex users, Overleaf is a very useful tool.