Research paper

Each student may prepare a 2000-4000 word research paper or an applied project, and present a short (20 minute) in class presentation summarizing the paper or project.

The mark for the project will be 20% for the paper or project and 5% for the presentation.

The paper will be due by 5p.m. on November 26th, and the presentations will be held during lectures/labs from Nov. 28th through Dec. 3rd.

In terms of topics, feel free to choose almost anything relevant to the course material, but be sure to emphasize the technical content and to investigate at a greater depth than what we cover in lectures.

Some applications/areas that you might investigate include search engines (google, bing, etc), social networking apps (facebook, myspace, etc), media distribution (youtube), communication tools (skype), sales systems (amazon, ebay), cloud computing, etc etc. I would recommend concentrating on a specific aspect of the system or area you choose to study, such as the database architecture/query handling, the fault toleance/reliability mechanisms, the security/privacy aspects, etc.

If you have an idea for an applied project feel free to bounce that off me as well - hopefully we can make this as interesting as possible for everyone! One possibility is to do some work/analysis on the (open source) code for the Ryzom MMORPG ( dev.ryzom.com .