Guidelines for Final Deliverables

You must submit the final report for review and receive a preliminary approval before you can schedule the final presentation. Allow four weeks for the instructor to review the final report. It is common that the final reports will go through a few iterations of reviews and revisions. The final approval of the report will be given after the presentation and after completing all the necessary revisions.

A draft of the final report must be made available on your project web site four weeks before the scheduled presentation, so it can be reviewed by other students to provide you with feedback.

Final Deliverables

MS Project

• A final report. The main body of the report should be about 25 to 50 pages.
• Software, including project code, documentations, examples, installation instructions. All documentations and instructions must be in HTML.
• Final presentation slides.

MS Thesis

• A thesis. The main body of the thesis should be no less than 50 pages.
• Software, including project code, documentations, examples, installation instructions, if applicable. All documentations and instructions must be in HTML.
• Final presentation slides.
• Seven hard copies of the thesis for binding.

The Format of Final Reports and Theses

• The final report or thesis  must include: a title page, abstract, table of contents, main body, references, and appendices.
• The main body usually consists of the following sections
• Introduction:
• briefly defines the problems and outlines the solutions/results/recommendations;
• provides an overview of the rest of the document.
• Background
• discusses the background and prerequisite knowledge for readers to understand the problems and the solutions/results/recommendations.
• Several sections that
• discuss the problems as well as the solutions/results/recommendations in detail;
• for a development project, discuss the architecture and design of the project;
• discuss potential applications, if applicable;
• compare your solutions/results/recommendations with others, if applicable;
• Conclusion and future work
• summarizes the main contributions;
• discusses future work and directions.
• Lengthy code fragments and documentations should be included as appendices.
• The final report  or thesis may also include a dedication, a preface, and an index.
• The fonts used for the main text should be no larger than 12 points and no smaller than 10 points. The main text should be single spaced.
• The final report or thesis is considered your work. Thus all verbatim excerpts, illustrations, or diagrams from other sources (including books, articles, web pages, notes, course materials) must be
• enclosed between quotation marks for in-line quotes, or block-indented for block-quotes,
• within the limit of "fair use", and
• include citation after each occurrence.
Violations are considered plagiarism. Consult the university's Academic Integrity Policies, when in doubt.