Project

Overview

For the course project, you will work in teams (see Teams below). The goal of the project is to identify, design, and implement a research project that studies a relevant research problem in data privacy or privacy-aware computing (see some high level Project Ideas below). The relevance of the selected research problem is determined based on

• Related to the topics covered in class
• Have the potential for substantial research and technical contributions
• Completable by the end of the quarter (in under 10 weeks)

There are many opportunities for feedback on the projects throughout the quarter (see Deliverables below) and students are expected to make good use of them.

Teams

Create your own teams of 2-3 students. Working alone or in groups of >3 is generally discouraged; however, I (i.e., your instructor) may allow certain exceptions depending on the situation. Everyone on your team will get the same project grade. Your final report (see Deliverables below) should include a section called Individual Contributions that describes what each team member did. Please reach out to me if your group is having problems with the distribution of work in the chosen project.

Project ideas

I encourage you to choose a topic of interest, read a few related papers, and think of possible extensions. If there’s a topic that interests you in your own research, feel free to build it into your project! To help you get started, here are some high level project ideas.

• Studying a privacy regulation article in detail and formalizing compliance
• Developing a website for showcasing a privacy-aware computing technique
• Automatically analyze privacy policies of organizations
• Reproducing results from a research paper or extending the technical approach
• Testing a research tool with a different dataset
• Analyzing a website/mobile app/smart device and identifying privacy concerns
• Survey of research papers on a specific privacy-aware computing technique
• Survey of privacy tools (e.g., https://www.privacyguides.org/)
• Applying privacy-aware computing techniques to Capstone projects
• Develop a tool to inform and possibly control the data collection by different sensors in PSU buildings
• Contribute to one of the ongoing research projects in DIPr lab

Deliverables

Please see the class schedule for when each of these are due. Submit them by due dates for consideration for full points.

Team information

Input your team information on this Google sheet (requires you to be logged with your PSU email account to access it) with team members, team name (optional), and tentative project idea (optional).

Project proposal with discussion

A short presentation (2-4 slides) that answers the following questions.

1. What makes your project unique/novel in that problem space? To answer this, review related work in the area. A good starting point is searching Google Scholar using keywords relevant to your project.

2. What is the solution/approach that you are proposing to the problem? Consider how this solution will improve privacy or privacy-awareness.

3. How will you evaluate the effectiveness of your approach? What metrics will you use? Examples include privacy, accuracy, latency etc. Include details of any datasets that will be used for evaluation if relevant.

   • Alternatively, if your project involves showcasing a Privacy-aware computing technique, what demonstration of the approach will you show to the class during the final presentation?

4. What is the anticipated timeline for completion of this project? This is optional but recommended.

Each group will present in the class for 2-3 minutes and there will be time for questions afterward. Upload the presentation the midnight before the day of presentation.

Mid-quarter Report

The mid-quarter report should between 2-4 pages and include a more concrete definition of the project and describe the progress your team has made since the proposal. You can also outline any of the challenges identified and your plans to address them. The report should contain the following sections

• Project title and names of team members
• Abstract (A brief summary (150-200 words) of the project’s goals, methods, progress, and key results so far.)
• Introduction (Describe the problem that you are addressing in this project and why it is interesting in the context of Privacy-aware Computing. Include examples or case studies to motivate the problem. Briefly describe what you hope to achieve at the completion of the project. )
• Related Work (Overview of previous work related to project including research papers, projects, applications, or regulations. Importantly, how does your project relate to these existing approaches?)
• Project Description (A detailed description of the project including details of the specific privacy problem that you are addressing, definitions of terminology, details of the solution/approach, how the solution will improve privacy or privacy-awareness, how you are implementing the solution so far - details of tools/algorithms/frameworks that you are using, how you plan to evaluate your approach and what will be the metrics used. Include any architectural diagram or system diagrams of your approach. This will most likely be largest section of the report.)
• Timeline for the project (Include details of the tasks completed in the project and milestones achieved as well as the remaining tasks and how you plan to complete before the project presentation on March 10th. Optionally, include mention any technical or logistical challenges your team is facing and how you plan to address them. )
• Results and analysis (Include any preliminary results from testing and development if it is relevant. If you do so, include an analysis of the findings.)
• Conclusions (Summary of the current progress and a look ahead to the final stage of the project)
• Individual Contributions (Describe in few lines about each team member’s contribution to the project until this point.)
• References (Any sources you’ve cited in the report, such as research papers, books, or online documentation. Include this in the bibliography (Bibliography management with bibtex) included with the template)

The report should be written in LaTeX (Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes) using the VLDB template and the generated PDF should be uploaded to Canvas. You can use Overleaf for this purpose or any desktop-based LaTeX editor. The report will be graded for completeness, correctness, presentation, and grammatical accuracy.

Final presentation

The final presentation should be at most 10 minutes in length (will be strictly enforced) followed by 3 minutes of Q & A. Your presentation should include the following sections, though you are welcome to add other sections as needed. Please practice your talk multiple times to ensure it fits within the 10-minute time frame.

• Project title, team #, names of team members
• Problem statement - describe the problem that your project address. Include relevant news articles, research papers, blog articles that motivate the problem.
• Project goals - State the goals of the project and how it addressess the problem presented earlier.
• Approach - Describe in detail the technical approach of your project. Mention also the tools/techniques used. Distinguish your approach from the prior work done on the topic.
• Results and Findings - Present the results from evaluation and the key findings from evaluations.
• Demo (optional) - If relevant, give a live demo of your project.
• Takeaways - Recap the main points of the project, outline what could be the future steps for your project, and end the presentation with a strong closing statement by highlighting the possible impact of your work.

Upload the presentation the midnight before the day of presentation.

Final report

The final report should be between 6-8 pages and should include the following sections. This will be an extension of the mid-quarter report with more details.

Important: Address all the questions/comments that you received for the mid-quarter report in the final report.

• Project title with names of team members
• Abstract
• Introduction (Present examples to illustrate the privacy or privacy-awareness that you are studying.)
• Related Work (Include comparison of your work with at least 3 other related works.)
• Preliminaries (Necessary background for the reader of this report. Examples of these could be the definition of ABAC, k-anonymity or DP used in your work. )
• Project Description
• Results & Analysis (Measure the impact of your project along 1 or more metrics and present the results using graphs. These could be privacy v/s utility, run-time, latency, or any other metric. Explain your choice of metric in the project description. Explain the results presented on whether it matches your expectations. Explain why or why not. )
• Discussion of limitations
• Challenges and opportunities for future work
• Conclusions
• Individual Contributions (For each teammember, describe in a paragraph their contributions to the project.)
• References

Similar to midterm report, this should be written in LaTeX too.

Note: You are encouraged to expand the project into a publishable research paper beyond the class but the final report has to be submitted as per the class schedule.

This project document is inspired by the Project Guidelines in CSE 582: Ethics in Artificial Intelligence.