msc-checklist.md

Checklist for MSc Deliverables

The following checklist applies to MSc deliverables in Aberdeen. Do not forget to read my tips on writing good science, and double check the MSc Manual. Since I want all academic documents written in LaTeX, please use this handy template for theses at Aberdeen. You should probably use Overleaf to write your LaTeX documents so you can easily share it with me for feedback. Please do not email me Word Documents or PDFs, I will comment directly on your LaTeX sources. If you don't know anything about LaTeX, I suggest you check out this Quick tutorial on LaTeX available on Github. Finally, besides the specific points I make in this checklist, be mindful of the following quality items for anything scientific you write:

• Figures and Tables must always have a numbered caption and be referenced in the text. A Figure may be worth a thousand words, but it must be described in a couple of dozen to make sense in the text.
• Level of detail: when talking about multiple subjects in a section, be sure to use a consistent level of detail. It reads very poorly if you describe a certain technique in a three-sentence paragraph while put the code in C for another technique in the same section.
• Arguments and citations: any objective statement (which ought to be most of your text) you write in your text must be backed either by your own work (self-contained) or by a citation to somebody else's peer-reviewed work. Be very careful about statements of the type 'Algorithm X and Y are the most widely used for frombotzing deterons'

Project Plan

The text you deliver as your plan must clearly outline what you want to study throughout the semester. You do not necessarily need to have a specific problem set out yet. However, you must know clearly what is the general area in which you want to solve a problem, and show that you have used the first few weeks to read about it. This is what I expect of the text my students hand in:

• Abstract: the abstract must answer the following questions
  • What is the problem your project aims to address?
  • Why is this problem interesting?
  • How do you aim to solve the problem?
  • What follows from your solution?
• Introduction: check that your introduction satisfies the following items:
  • Avoid jargon
    Do you avoid jargon that you only explain in the rest of the text?
  • Clarity
    Can anyone from computer science read the introduction and understand what you want to achieve?
  • Does it clearly describe the problem?
  • Does the introduction clearly state the contributions?
  • Does the introduction motivate the problem you are trying to solve?

• Objectives: this is the objective of your design, it will generally focus on studying something to plan for its implementation
  • General objective
    i.e. a brief statement of what it is you want to accomplish
  • Specific objectives
    i.e. a list of concrete goals (you can think of them as 'deliverables')
• Risk Assessment:
  • Does it account for unusual requirements
    such as data, hardware, or any critical resource not usually available at the university?
  • Do you have a mitigation plan for the lack of the above?
• Outline Timetable:
  • Real timeline
    Does it contain work for all months of the work? Do not count the month you wrote this.
  • Realistic plan
    Avoid doing too many actions in the same month
  • Achievable plan
    You must be able to deliver what you said you would
  • Avoid copying specific objectives
    but the work to reach them can drive this timeline
• Bibliography: check the bibliography for the following items
  • Are all references rendering correctly with BibTex (check for foreign language characters and odd symbols)?
  • Are all references correct? Remember DBLP, ACM, Google Scholar and other automated databases do contain errors
  • Are any important references missing?

MSc Dissertation

• Abstract: the abstract must answer the following questions
  • What is the problem your contribution addresses?
  • Why is this problem interesting?
  • How do you solve the problem?
  • What follows from your solution?
• Table of Contents
• Glossary/Abbreviations (if your work is acronym heavy)
• Introduction: check that your introduction satisfies the following items:
  • Avoid jargon
    Do you avoid jargon that you only explain in the rest of the text?
  • Clarity
    Can anyone from computer science read the introduction and understand what's the objective?
  • Does it clearly describe the problem?
  • Does the introduction clearly state the contributions?
• Literature Review Chapters: must convey your knowledge of the subject of the work, so check for
  • Self-containment
    Is the literature review enough to understand how you solve the problem?
  • To the point
    Do you have content that is not really relevant for the work? You may need to remove stuff from the material you wrote before to match the problem you actually solved
  • Balanced chapters/sections
    the review chapter can be divided into multiple chapters, make sure subjects are well-balanced in the chapters
  • Basic definitions
    Does it provide basic definitions of the area?
  • Terminology dropping from the sky
    new technical terms must be explained before they are used, avoid talk about a deteronic frombotzer if you have not said what this is
  • Consistency of terminology
    do not use different terms to refer to the same technical entity, once you define something as X always refer to it as X
• Implementation/Development: here you should describe the details of your contribution so that others can replicate it. Check for
  • Replicability: is there enough detail that one of your colleagues can replicate your work without looking at your code?
  • Internal consistency: is the terminology and technical concepts used here consistent with what you defined in the literature review?
• Evaluation: for works with an empirical evaluation component. Check for
  • Environment description: do you clearly describe your testing rig?
  • Results: do you include an objective description of your results (tables, graphs, et)?
  • Assessment: do you explain the meaning of the results and the implication of them to the problem?
• Conclusion: here, you summarize what are your contributions and how you envision them going forward
  • Contributions: what did you achieve in this work?
  • Limitations: what are any problems or limitations to your contribution?
  • Future work: what can be done to improve your work?