CS491 Senior Design Project I
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Computer Engineering Department CS491 Senior Design Project I |
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| Fall 2023 | ||
CS491 Senior Design Project I course is the first half of two-semester course that will allow all senior CS students to gain and practice the required abilities and skills in the engineering design process.
All students enrolled in the Computer Engineering program at Bilkent University have the opportunity to learn and practice engineering design, through their coursework and, CS491 and CS492 capstone project courses will give a unique opportunity to demonstrate these skills within a team of 3-5 students.
CS491-CS492 projects are directed toward an innovative solution to a real and substantial problem. Students need to show their engineering design skills to solve practical and theoretical engineering problems that they will choose and pre-approved by the faculty. Below you can see the key outcomes of this course:
Progress and final output of teamwork needs to be presented in both written and oral form during the course. Teams are advised to select complex and challenging subjects so that, they can demonstrate the knowledge and skills that they got from the engineering coursework, to analyze, develop, test, iterate, improve and deliver their design concepts using modeled or simulated artifacts and working prototypes.
Both CS491 and CS492 courses are 3 credits (6 ECTS credits). CS202 and CS319 are prerequisites of CS491.
1. Each senior student needs to apply for CS491 course. Yes, all graduated engineers once completed a capstone project in their UG academic life. You will both benefit from learning new technologies, create working solutions to real-life problems and also this course provides a great opportunity to differentiate yourself in job interviews and demonstrate your capability to successfully execute an end-to-end project within a team. You are not expected to produce a project that is simply graded and forgotten in a zip file. Instead, the expectation is to work on projects that have the potential to be developed further, either as personal pet projects,open-source initiatives, or even as a foundation for building a future startup.
2. Capstone projects are team-based projects that require a substantial amount of consistent work. The likelihood of achieving good results without regular effort and leaving everything to the last weeks is close to zero. Each project team should consist of 3-5 members.
/*Do a simple calculation, previous year project plans and experience shows that an average of 900 to 1000 hours of effort needs to be spent in each semester for a succesful capstone project delivery. It corresponds working 20+ full days in each semester, individually, for capstone project and it also complies with the fact that each ECTS credit usually requires ~28 hour of individual work. There will be too many tasks and each component of the project needs to be handled and distributed among team members which requires proper planning and good amount of manpower to design, setup a team workspace environment, implement, test, publish, promote, document the project. So, 5-member teams are advised for this challenging capstone design project due to compexity and heavy work.*/
3. You should be aware that one of the important objectives of this course is being able to form a team spirit, working together, dividing tasks equally, being able to demonstrate leadership when necessary, and prioritizing work by adhering to the business plan and deadlines.
/*Even if students submit a complete project, their failure to cultivate a sense of teamwork may result in them being assessed as not fully meet the requirements of the course. In your professioal work life, you won't be able to choose your colleagues, yet you will still be required to fulfill your role within the team professionally. Keep in mind that there are both advantages and disadvantages to form your own team with your close friends. Create a team consisting of individuals who are committed to working in the same style and towards the same goal, so that in certain situations and especially during peak season, the project does not become solely your individual problem. */
4. Each project is undertaken by the supervision of a faculty member of the Computer Engineering Department and the CS491/2 Course Instructors. Each team will propose a project to one of the faculty members as their candidate supervisor.
5. All the senior design projects ideas are expected to tackle engineering challenges.
6. The proposed project topic may be entirely identified and formulated by the team or the idea might be related to a faculty member’s research interest, which is turned into a proposal by the team. The project idea needs to be discussed by the proposing team, the supervising faculty member and the CS 491/2 Course Instructors.
7. When choosing a project topic, it is important to note that one of the key considerations is not necessarily finding a unique and never-before-done project idea. You can add new value to an existing solutions or service but, simply replicating what has already been done by commercial companies or previour year graduates such as shopping applications, travel applications, car sharing for university students or home sharing apps without generating a differentiator value is not considered as proper project topics. If you cannot provide or demonstrate a significant innovation that sets your project apart at the end of each semester, your project topic can limit the final grade you will receive in this course.
8. You can find sponsor companies or investors in the industry and you can propose your project idea that addresses a specific need of your project sponsor. There should not be any conflict of interest between the sponsor and team members (e.g. none of the team members should be working in the sponsor company as full or part-time engineers or the project should not be some part or component of a ongoing project or another wider project).
9. In addition to how you will implement the project, it is essential and adviced to consider how you will bring the project to life and what will be your business plan to support your initial costs, how you will present it to your instructors and to the CSFair audience at the end of the year, what kind of hardware and computational power it will require, and who will be your target customers. Therefore, we recommend starting with multiple project topics and seeking input from your course instructors, supervisors as well as receiving support from innovation experts in the industry, before proceeding with the idea that stands out the most. During first semester you will have chance to alter your proposal and do small changes to the featuresets that you commited to implement by communicating with your course instructors. Still, we suggest you to start by researching innovation types (google keyword: 10 types of innovation wheel). Apply your knowledge and experience to solve the difficuilties, struggles that you or your possible customers faces in daily life. Do your duty and research for possible project topics. Search Reddit, Facebook, Linkedin or sikayetvar.com for common struggles of the community. Try to maximize the % of your possible customers who will benefit from your project. Ideas with greater potential impact are generally considered better and can be evaluated as high business potential.
10. In addition, if the project idea originates from you, you will need to find an innovation expert from the list of volunteer innovation experts to evaluate and approve your project proposal. You can propose C-level connections as Innovation Expert to course instructors at the beginning of the semester as well.
If the project idea originates from CS faculty member(your supervisor or instructor), he/she can also undertake the Innovation Expert role as well. All project teams also needs to present their project to their innovation expert for assessment of the innovativeness of their project. Please use Assessment of Innovation Form v4. Assessment of the Innovation form signed by your Innovation Expert needs to be sent to the course instructors via Moodle. The team and the innovation expert may prepare and sign a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) or a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) to protect your intellectual property.
11. After the project idea and the related engineering challenges are determined, 2 course instructors and 1 faculty member will form the jury for each project and will evaluate the progress during progress meetings and presentations that will be held at the end of each semester.
12. Each faculty member usually supervise up to 3 teams. If you see that a faculty member is already supervising 3 teams, then you should contact other faculty member with less number of teams. Below you see links to pages of supervisors showing the teams they are committed to supervising.
[Selim Aksoy] [Can Alkan] [Shervin Arashloo] [Cevdet Aykanat] [Fazlı Can] [Ercüment Çicek] [Hamdi Dibeklioğlu] [Uğur Dogrusöz] [Ayşegül Dündar] [Uğur Güdükbay] [Altay Güvenir] [Anıl Koyuncu] [İbrahim Körpeoğlu] [Özgür S. Öğüz] [Özcan Öztürk] [Sinem Sav] [Eray Tüzün] [Özgür Ulusoy]
13. Project Information Form submission is the first step to register your team and project topic to this CS491 course and it needs to be submitted at 2nd week of fall semester. See Project Information Form Guideline for detail instructions.
14. During the first semester, each project team needs to set up and attend at least 3 online meetings with course instructors. You may plan to use these meeting slots at least monthly for:
- Project proposal meeting
- Functional discussion meeting and feedback about the submitted reports.
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Final meeting before presentation and demo
and invite project supervisor (optional) to discuss and show your progress. Attendance and contribution are advised to these meetings. Meeting minutes and outcomes of the discussions needs to be documented by students and needs to be e-mailed to course instructors and supervisors in the same day. See the document template for meeting minutes.
15. During CS491 course, 2 reports will be prepared and submitted by each team. (Project Specifications Report, Analysis and Requirement Report) All documents needs to be submitted via Moodle.
16. Each student is required to create one online project logbook and record the progress of their design project during CS491/CS492 in their personal logbook. Using a logbook is a standard practice in the industry and it will help to keep information organized and available. Estimations, calculations, links, choices you prefer in each step, literature search efforts, drawings, handouts, personal thoughts and reflections concerning the project or process, and conversations with potential customers, sponsors and legal entities can be recorded to the logbook. Google docs platform is quite good to host your logbook. Students should share it with their supervisor and course instructors when requested.
17. CS491 course also contains weekly guest-speaker seminar series that covers a wide variety of topics from academic, industrial, commercial, and non-profit sectors. We hope these seminars will help project teams to improve their project scope and also help final year students to bridge the gap between the student life and their future work life. Attendance to the seminars has %20 impact to your CS491 final grades.
18. Check CS491 course webpage and course moodle page regularly for updates on deadlines and other requirements.
19. While sending e-mail to your course instructors or your supervisor, always put your Project_Team_ID prefix to your e-mail subject. If you are sending an email on behalf of the team, it is important to include your teammates in the cc field of your e-mail. Sending an email with a poor subject e.g. "inquiry" and with a poor content e.g. "is it possible to postpone the deadline of report, BR" without indicating your team_id or without CC your teammates may lead us to question your readiness to graduate and to become an engineer and may effect your individual grade from this course. This course has one section and it is one of the most crowded one in the department, so keep it clear while identifying yourself and while communicating.
Below are the specific deadlines set for 2023.
1.Project Information Form
2. Assessment of Innovation form
3. Project Specification Document
4. Analysis and Requirements Report
5. Presentation and Demo
See CS491 deliverables sub page for more information about each of them.
Grading
Total grade has two components:
70%: Group grade. It is the average of grades given by the 3 jury members and Innovation Experts for the performance of the group throughout the semester.
30%: Contribution/Participation in the project. It is determined by the 3 jury members separately for each group member.
The supervisor or course instructors may use some tools to monitor the progress of students incluing logbooks, peer grading, repository logs,etc. He/she does not have to use the peer grades as they are; he/she has the right to use his/her own judgment and do individual meetings with each team member to clearly identify the individual efforts.
The letter grades will be assigned according to the following table:
Range |
Grade |
| 90-100 | A |
| 85-89 | A- |
| 80-84 | B+ |
| 75-79 | B |
| 70-74 | B- |
| 65-69 | C+ |
| 60-64 | C |
| 55-59 | C- |
| 50-54 | D+ |
| 45-49 | D |
| 0-44 | F |