Course Project
Throughout the course, students will work in small groups (up to 4 students) to conduct a research project on an interesting usable security and privacy-related problem. The project will be evaluated according to the group size. Please form your groups by Monday, October 8 and add your group in the sign-up sheet in Canvas.
Students will have the option to choose from a list of potential project topics provided by the instructor. Students will also have the option to propose project ideas that link the projects to their own research. All students/groups are required to schedule office hours with the instructor to discuss and finalize their project topic before Week 4.
Project Proposal Presentation
Each group will deliver an in-class 5-minute presentation with a 2-minute Q&A session. A representative of each group will talk about their proposed project and get feedback from the class. In the presentation, please focus on answering the following questions:- Problem - why is it important and relevant?
- Related work – what has been done before to address this problem, and what gaps remain?
- Approach and methodology – what will you do to address the gap, and why do you think it will work?
- Results – what do you expect to achieve in the project?
Project Proposal
Please write a 4-page proposal for the course project to detail the following:- Group: Group member names and netID.
- Title: The title of your project. Titles of survey projects need to start with "SoK:".
- Introduction: A description of the problem you are focusing on and why it is important for usable security and privacy.
- Background and Related Work: A survey of related work and any essential background necessary for understanding the problem.
- System/Methodology: A description of your approach to address the problem and how it addresses prior works' gaps.
- Evaluation: A description of the methods and metrics you will use to test how well your approach works.
- Results: A summary of the results you plan to achieve by the end of the quarter.
- Timeline: An overview of the subtasks for the project and their expected timeline.
Project Presentation
At the end of the quarter, all groups will present their project in an in-class 15-minute presentation, following the conference-style presentations, including Q&A. This presentation should include an introduction of the problem, necessary background and related work, details of the system or methodology developed, evaluation results, potential future work, and key takeaways from the project.
Project Final Report
Please write a 10-page report of your project in the style of a conference paper (including text, figures, and references). The report should include the following sections:
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Background and Related Work
- Methodology
- Evaluation
- Discussion and Limitations
- Conclusions
Note: Both the project proposal and the final report must be formatted in two columns using the USENIX template files. Students are strongly encouraged to use LaTeX for typesetting. A sample report template is available here. Students are welcome to create a copy of this Overleaf project and use it for the project proposal and report. Here is a short guide for using LaTeX.