63.490: Directed Study in Computer Science

David Keil, Framingham State College

Guidelines

Students make a proposal for Directed Study, with approval of instructor, and submit the proposal with instructor’s signature to the Registrar.

The directed study courses that I supervise should be in either of two areas:

· my area of research: models of interactive or multi-agent systems, evolutionary computation, artificial intelligence, and similar areas; or,

· in case a student must fulfill a course requirement to graduate on time and the course is not offered before graduation date, directed study in certain cases may follow a course description of an upper-level course such as Theory of Computing or Analysis of Algorithms.

Any directed study should involve some original research.

Proposals should be written by the student, including title, area of investigation, questions to be answered by research, and some sources to be used. I will suggest modifications to proposals and the resulting agreed-on proposal will be submitted to the Registrar.

The way of proceeding will be that the student will meet with me two or more times, will submit progress reports weekly, and will communicate frequently about the research. Progress reports should include draft material for a final paper. The research, in other words, will be guided.

I am interested in posting publicly any directed-study projects completed under my supervision. Ideally, any project should be of credible form to be submitted to an academic conference, student authored or co-authored. Even excellent undergraduate research is not, however, expected to be sufficiently original to merit publication.