The dissertation project is an extended piece of individual work, occupying your time from the end of your second year through to the second semester in your third year. Many of you will find it to be the most enjoyable and stimulating thing you do in your degree. The aims of the project are to encourage and reward individual inventiveness and application of effort but you will have an academic supervisor to advise you whom you will meet regularly throughout your 3rd year.

The project will develop your ability to:

• Construct a project from initial (perhaps unstructured) ideas, via a thorough analysis of the problem area: In most cases, the project outline that you start with will be reworked (altered) by you in conjunction with your supervisor;
• Plan, schedule, monitor and control your own work: You can demonstrate this in a number of ways, e.g. being prepared for meetings with your supervisor and keeping a web site describing progress on your project;
• Defend your ideas in discussions and presentation : Plan ahead, find evidence and argue for your ideas;
• Use libraries and other information sources: This demonstrates your ability to work on your own and find further relevant information and tools for your project;
• Apply relevant tools and techniques (e.g. design and project management tools from taught modules): Demonstrate practical skills and understanding of theory;
  
• Communicate findings in a variety of ways (e.g. written report, poster and viva).

For students taking COM3610 the project is equivalent to four half modules (40 credits) and thus constitutes a major part of your degree. Students taking COM3500 spend less time working on their project, and only get 30 credits for it so they are required to hand in shorter reports but the pattern of work is the same.

Your project must be an individual piece of work (plagiarism will result in a fail or worse), but it will probably fit into one of a number of types of project (see below). This can help guide you as to the way to attack the project. You should discuss this with your supervisor early in the life of the project. Guidelines are given for the final dissertation structure, but these guidelines should be adapted for the different types of project. Again this is a subject for discussion with your supervisor. It will probably help to look at some previous dissertations, perhaps asking your supervisor to recommend good ones.

Project Types

Broadly speaking, there are three basic types of project: the experimental, the theoretical and the design project. Some projects may combine features from more than one of these types.

• Design and build: These projects should involve the main activities associated with the development of a well-engineered software system for carrying out the particular task required by the project: requirements analysis, specification, program design, implementation, system testing (including field testing and user comments), documentation and maintenance. Most of these stages are likely to be included in the report and the reasons for the various design decisions will be carefully described.
• Experimental: These projects involve the investigation and evaluation of a new piece of technology (eg, an AI search algorithm or a statistical model for text processing). This may involve a substantial amount of (software or hardware) implementation and the application of scientific measurements and investigations to ascertain its properties and usefulness. Such a project will necessarily have a report which will describe the theoretical foundations of the technology, a description of the implementation and the experimental procedures used and an analysis of the results, together with an assessment of the relationship between the project work and other published work. Thus there should be a discussion of the problems of existing methods and how the new ideas overcome any of these problems.
• Theoretical: Project dissertations in this category tend to concentrate on introducing the relevant concepts with suitable examples, investigating further examples, making and testing conjectures, developing theorems and proofs, where appropriate, and assessing the results, with attention given in suitable cases to possible applications.

Note: It is important when writing your dissertation for each of these types of project that a chapter be included which presents the results of the project and critically assesses them, reporting on both successes and failures in the work.

If your project will involve human participants, data or tissue, you may need to complete an ethics application. Please refer to this page for further information.