About selecting a topic.
You may have a project in mind, otherwise I can help you select a project. I usually have one or two ideas for projects or I work together with students to define
a projet of their choice. The general algorithm for finding a project (if you
don't have one in mind) is:
I usually ask students to
peruse the general topics in computer graphics that are being actively
researched in order to get an idea what they may be interested in. A good
way to get an idea about some topic areas is to look at the titles of
research papers being presented at siggraph. For example the current
topics that will be presented at Siggraph 2007 can be found at:
http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/attendees/papers/
Then for each section it will list the title of the papers, you can then
use google on that title (or author or combination of both) to find a pdf
of the paper (they are not available on the siggraph site).
Once you've found one or two papers or research areas that interest you, come talk to me and we can start to define an appropriately scoped project based
on your interest.
Once you have a project, I typically like to meet once a week for ~30 minutes to discuss your project, progress, issues and what is next on the project.
Write-up
When your project is complete and you will need to write up your thesis. In general, I expect your thesis to read like a research paper in computer graphics.
If you have not read any research papers in computer graphics at this point,
you've done a poor job doing your related works research, so go back and read a
bunch of papers about your topic area ;) You can also look at the guide line
for writting up a
senior project .
Or at past
master's thesis from student's I have worked with.
I typically like to see a complete draft of your write-up, which I
give feed-back on and you then edit before you schedule a defense.
Defense
Prepare a professional style talk
Prepare approximately 40 slides -
Plan to talk about 40 minutes (I will
likely interupt with questions during which will make it ~hour of talking
then time after for general questions)
Have very few words per slide and many pictures/figures/illustrations
(ideally one per page - even if it means repeating pictures).
Do follow the general outline of your write-up (but you can move related
works to the end if it breaks up the story) but you can also add more
story elements to keep the audience involved.
Be sure to include goals, motivation, and algorithm summary earlier on in
the talk.
Do include the technical details of interesting aspects of the thesis. And do
include a contributions slide.
In general you are trying to convey that
a) you have learned and mastered a great deal about your topic
b) contributed something novel
I will want to see your slides (or even a practice talk) before you do your defense.
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