COMP340 - Literature Review Project

Your final project for this class is a literature review of a specific algorithmic problem with a 10-15 minute presentation of your findings. The ultimate goal here is bring to life one of the algorithmic problems from part II of the text by doing a focused, concrete look at a specific aspect of that problem. The challenge you’ll face should be one of editing. The catalog presents a wide-angle view of generalized algorithms and data structures. It’s more detail than you can talk about in 10 or 15 minutes. You want to make those problems concrete and edit down the details to a narrow slice of information about that problem. A successful presentation will entice the audience to dig deeper into your problem by introducing them to the problem and illuminating some small slice of that space that problem occupies in the world of computing.

Finding a Focus

The critical step in the project narrowing your focus and choosing a specific focal point for your algorithmic problem. The catalog entry for your problem is likely to give you ideas, but you might also run across something by reading some cited papers or scouring some other sources. Either way, you focal point should be specific, concrete, and clearly cover a narrow slice of the whole of your problem. Possible focal points could be:

• A Specific Application (i.e. real-world problem)
• A Specific Implementation (i.e. in a language library)
• A Specific, Special Case of the Problem
• A Notable place in History (People Involved, story about publication, etc.)

The Presentation

You should proceed as though your goal is to present your focal point to a moderately informed audience (fellow CS people that don’t necessarily know anything about your problem & focus). In order to do this properly, you need to also present aspects of the problem in general. The result is a presentation that starts broad, narrows its scope to the focus, then broadens once more as you reiterate your focal point’s relation to a larger algorithmic problem.

Your 10 to 15 minute presentation should have the following format:

1. Problem Introduction: Background & History
2. Problem Illustration: Concrete Examples
3. Focal Point Introduction
4. Focal Point Illustration & Details
5. Conclusion: Re-relate focal point to Problem. Connect it to other, related focal points.
6. Work Cited

You should create slides to aid your presentation, make good use of images over text, and utilize proper citations throughout the slides.

Grading

Your grade will be determined by the quality and of your presentation. High quality presentations should:

• Be well prepared, not off the cuff
• Accurately represent the problem and the focus
• Be clear in purpose and focus
• Effectively utilize slides (they’re an aid to the presentation, not the presentation itself)
• Use proper figure/image captions and source citations.