CMPSC 600/610: Senior Thesis starter

This repository contains the starter materials for your thesis in Computer Science 600 and 610 in 2021-2022 academic year. The main directory of this repository contains the LaTeX source code for a project that is designed for use with GitHub Classroom. To learn more about the course in which these assignments were completed, please visit the Computer Science Thesis Fall 2021 Allegheny College GitHub Organization.

The LaTeX file in this repository is automatically compiled with GitHub Actions, ensuring that it compiles correctly and, moreover, that a PDF of the thesis document is available in your GitHub repository whenever tagging a commit for a release.

Overview

This assignment requires a researcher to write a LaTeX document, stored in the file SeniorThesis.tex that describes the key aspects of a senior thesis research project. Please refer to the source code in this file for an explanation of the components of a senior thesis and the way in which you create them in LaTeX.

Your course instructor will reduce a researcher's grade for this assignment if the pdf of your completed thesis document has not been properly released before the assignment's due date on December 13, 2021 at 11:59 pm. Unless you provide the course instructors with documentation of the extenuating circumstances that you are facing, no late work will be considered towards your grade for this project.

For specific details about the general evaluation rubric for minimum requirements please see thesis guidelines.

Explanation of sections

Please consult the following sub-sections, as section requirements have changed from requirements in previous years. All descriptions of each section are delimited by the understanding that sections should "include, but not be limited to" the areas highlighted.

Also keep in mind that the typical instruction to

whenever possible, use and describe one or more concrete examples and technical diagrams

applies across all relevant sections listed below.

A final note about requirements: nearly all of the sections requests some discussion of ethical implications inherent in projects. The ways in which ethical issues impact research will vary from project to project. Readers will be able to guide students on a project-by-project basis toward responding to the ethics requirements listed below.

Introduction

• a statement of the problem addressed in this research
• overall project aims
• background motivating your research
• a high-level overview of ethical issues implied by the current state of the problem underlying the work

Related Works

• the review of relevant existing work (i.e. "literature review")
  • the literature review should be a concise, scholarly review of the literature explaining the background to the proposed research
  • the review should provide the context for the aims of the research in relation to existing work on the topic
  • review of ethical discussions referenced in the Introduction

Method of Approach

• describes the infrastructure and tools implemented to serve, test, and support research and conduct experiments
• enumerates the general processes and code used by the project
  • here, where using diagrams or code snippets, elaboration of any included material is required
• addresses the interventions that the research incorporates or develops to address ethical concerns in datasets, software processes, or theoretical approaches

Experiments

• displays and discusses evaluative metrics and data used as validation strategies the projects
• clearly defines thresholds for success, and discusses the outcomes of experiments relative to them
• discusses any threats to validity that remain from the original summary of the research or those introduced by any approaches or data used in the these research and implementation process

Conclusion

• provides a summary of your research and experimental outcomes
• proposes, where applicable, future areas of work or research indicated by the conclusion of this research
• includes an evidence- or results-based appraisal of ethical issues left unresolved or created by research

Tagging

Since this repository primarily contains LaTeX source code, the GitHub Actions configuration for it will compile the source code and automatically release a PDF of the main file whenever the last commit is associated with a Git Tag.

This will build a PDF file available in the "Releases" listing for this repository. All release numbers for your writing in this repository should adhere to the Semantic Versioning standard expected of GitHub projects. Here this means that:

• Major version releases feature a tag number change reflecting full releases; generally these start at 1.0.0
• Minor version releases indicate small changes or additions to documents; typically these increment the second digit in the version (e.g. 1.1.0)

Please note that your readers will only read the PDF generated from "tagged" releases of the file SeniorThesis.pdf that has a version number greater than 1.0.0.

That is:

• if your commit is tagged SeniorThesis-chompers-1.0.0, then
• the file SeniorThesis.pdf should be available for download in the "Releases" tab in your GitHub repository for this project under the name SeniorThesis-chompers-1.0.0.

To ensure you can create a release appropriately, make a single small change to the SeniorThesis.tex and:

1. commit your file using a git commit command
2. create your first tag for this repository: type git tag senior_thesis-YOUR_USERNAME-0.1.0.
3. You are now ready to push your changes with the tag number using git push -u origin main --tags

The above steps should build a version of your project.

When you make subsequent changes to your files and perform commits and you are ready to release a new version of SeniorThesis.pdf, then you should again tag your work before a push command with a tag that adheres to the Semantic Versioning standard.

Each time that you correctly execute this sequence of commands you will release a new version of your document to GitHub that is easily accessible as a PDF to you and to your first and second readers.

Updates

If a course instructor updates the provided material for this assignment and you would like to receive these updates, then you can type this command in the main directory for this assignment:

git remote add download [email protected]:allegheny-computer-science-thesis-2021/cmpsc-dept-thesis.git

You should only need to type this command once; typing the command additional times may yield an error message but will not negatively influence the state of your repository. Now, you are ready to download the updates provided by the course instructor by typing:

git pull download main --allow-unrelated-histories

This second command can be run whenever the faculty need to provide you with new source code for this assignment. However, please note that, if you have edited the files that the course instructor updated, running the previous command may lead to Git merge conflicts. If this happens, you may need to manually resolve them with the help of the instructor or a teaching assistant.

Problems

If you have found a problem with this assignment's provided source code, then you can go to the Computer Science 600/610 Thesis starter repository and create an issue by clicking the "Issues" tab and then clicking the green "New Issue" button. To ensure that your issue is properly resolved, please provide as many details as is possible about the problem that you experienced.

Students who find, and use the appropriate GitHub issue tracker to correctly document, a mistake in any aspect of this laboratory assignment will receive free laptop stickers and extra credit towards their grade for it.

Assistance

If you are having trouble completing any part of this project, then please talk with your first reader. In particular, if you have questions about your research project, please see your first reader. Alternatively, you may ask questions in the Slack channel for this course.