NEW: Project Submission Details (posted 10/07/2002)
You landed a internship position with a once-high-flying company with a hiring freeze. Your boss assigns you your first task: to perform an in-depth research analysis on technology X, produce a research report, and give an oral briefing to your boss and colleagues. If you do well on this project, there is a small chance they may offer you a full-time position when the hiring freeze is over.
The report should include citations of references, as well as pointers and links to additional information available on the web, to facilitate further research by your peers. The oral briefing will give you a chance to practice effective communication to your peers on a technical subject matter. Specifically, you should be prepared to explain and answer questions about a new technology to an otherwise technically sophisticated audience.
Your report should answer the following questions, where applicable:
· What are the application(s) of this technology? Why is this
technology suitable?
· How does this technology work? [most important]
· What are some alternative/competing technologies, if any?
What are the comparative advantages and disadvantages?
· What is the future of this technology?
· Who are the vendors and proponents of this technology?
Your oral briefing should address the first four items of the above list, with particular focus on the 2nd item. Your goal should be to educate your boss and your colleagues on how the technology works, and answer any questions that they may have.
Each person must sign up for a different topic (we will do sign-ups at the end of class Sep 23). Here are some topics on your boss's radar screen:
802.11g
802.15
software radio
rain fade
rf-id
smart dust
HALO network
MANET (mobile ad hoc networks)
GPS (Global Positioning System)
turbo code
IPN (Inter-planetary Networking)
RED (Random Early Drop)
IP traceback
IP-storage
network tomography
DHT (distributed hash table)
W32.Klez
FBI's Magic Lantern
freehaven
Mojo Nation
Some of these acronyms may have several different expansions, and not all of them are networking related. If you are not sure, check with the boss. You are also welcome to pick a topic from projects of previous years, since many technologies have advanced significantly within the past year. Here are the projects from Spring 2000, Spring 2001 and Fall 2001. If you choose this option, your research findings should emphasize the most recent developments. Finally, you can also tell your boss that he is hopelessly stuck in the 20th century, and suggest (and obtain approval for) your own hot topic. (You can visit www.whatis.com for a large pot of networking-related alphabet soup.)
The deliverables are:
· 3-5 page report (html posted on course web site)
· 5-10 page presentation slides (posted on course web site)
· 15 minute presentation of findings (10 minutes presentation,
5 minutes Q&A)
Starting in mid October (after exam 1), we will devote portions of our meeting time to these presentations. The report and slides are due one business day before your scheduled presentation (Friday or Tuesday 11am) so that everyone will have a chance to review the material before your presentation. NEW: You have the option of submitting revised versions of your report and presentation slides before Nov 8.
You will need to submit your project report (in html) and presentation slides by using the file submission utility at:
https://cardea.sims.berkeley.edu/upload/is250/
You will be prompted to enter your LDAP userid and password. For non-SIMS students, LDAP accounts has been generated for you. I will hand out the userid and password information in class on Oct 9 and Oct 14. You can also request this information from me via email. For SIMS students, your SIMS userid and passwd should work.
You can upload multiple files in your personal directory, which will be:
/www/docs/courses/is250/f02/protected/projects/[username]
where [username] is the corresponding user's username. Since we put this in the protected area, the same access control will apply to the upload area when viewed from the web (no username and password needed at SIMS; username and password needed from outside of SIMS). Only you will have write permission for your own directory. You will be able to add files and replace an old file by a new file. You will be not able to remove a file from the directory, or to create any sub-directories.
A few notes to pay attention to:
- you MUST name your project report 'index.html'
- if you have any embedded images in your report, make sure that you
upload them as well, and make sure that you point to thm using relative
links, rather than absolute links, so that they will still work.
- you should upload your presentation slides to the same directory,
and make sure to include a hyperlink to your presentation slides from the
report itself.
You should try to access your own report from a browser to make sure that all the images display properly, and the presentation slides can be accessed:
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is250/f02/protected/projects/[username]
As a final step, once you've uploaded the files and tested their availability,
you should send an email to 'is250@sims.berkeley.edu' to announce the availability
of your report and slides. You need to do this at least one full
business day before your scheduled presentation time (Friday or Tuesday
11am).