CSC 590 Assignment 3, Winter 2015 – Related Work Chapter of Your Thesis
1 Requirements
For this assignment, you are to prepare a discussion of related work in a particular research area. The discussion is of the style that would appear in the "related work" chapter of a thesis, or a comparable chapter. As with assignment 4, the discussion may take one of three forms, depending on how close to a specific thesis topic you are in your studies.
Form 1: If you have an advisor and have chosen a specific topic, then your 590 related-work paper should be directly applicable to your thesis. Ideally, it should be usable directly as a chapter in the thesis. The specific content of such a chapter is worked out by you and your advisor. The 590 week 6 notes discuss general ideas of what is in a related work thesis chapter.
Form 2: If you do not have a specific thesis topic, but have an idea of what it might be, then you can do a presentation very similar to Form 1. The difference is that your idea will be less well articulated than in Form 1, so your discussion of related work will revolve more around the work of others than your own idea.
Form 3: If you have no specific idea for a thesis topic, then your related-work paper should be a critical compare-and-contrast review in a focused area of research. The idea of a "focused area of research" means that the area is the one you discussed in your first presentation, or one of comparable scope.
2 Examples
See http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~gfisher/classes/590/examples/assignment3/
3 Turn-in Procedure
Submit your paper via PolyLearn, on or before 7PM on the Wednesday of Finals week. In addition to the "native" format of your paper, please also submit a PDF version. So, if you use MS Word for your paper, submit both the Word doc as well as a PDF version.