Project Discussion

CS-GY 9223 - Fall 2025

Claudio Silva

NYU Tandon School of Engineering

2025-10-06

Acknowledgement

This presentation is heavily influenced and borrows directly from Prof. Christopher Manning’s Stanford cs224n project discussion.

The Final Project

You either:

  • Do the default project (more on this later)

  • Propose your own final project, which we must approve

    • For this, you will need a mentor (instructor/TA/postdoc/PhD)

You can work in teams of 1-3 people. Teams are encouraged. Obviously, more is expected from a team than an individual.

Custom Final Projects

  • You will need to talk to me or one of the following people about approval for a custom project:

    • Parikshit Solunke (Lead TA)
    • Sonia Castelo
    • Fabio Felix Dias
    • Joao Rulff
  • If you intend to do one, please reach out immediately.

Why Choose the Default Final Project (DFP)

  • If you have limited experience with research, don’t have a clear idea of what you want to do, or need guidance and a goal… Then do the default final project!

  • Considerations:

    • The final project will give you more guidance, scaffolding, and clear goals to aim at
    • The path of success is not to do something that looks weak compared to what you could have done with the DFP

Why do Custom Final Project (CFP)?

  • If you:

    • Have some research project that you’re very excited about, which involves the class topics
    • You want to try something on your own
    • You want to see more of the process of defining your own research goal, finding data and tools, etc
  • Then:

    • Do the custom project

Gamesmanship

  • DFP are a more guided option, but it’s not that they’re less work

  • DFP are also open-ended projects where you can explore different approaches and your own creativity

  • There are great DFP and great CFP… and weak DFP and CFP

  • We will be giving a Best Project Award for each type of project (assuming quantity and quality of entries)

Project Proposal (Due October 13)

  • Find a relevant (key) research paper for your topic

    • For DFP, those are provided
  • Write a summary of that research paper and what you took away from it as key ideas that you hope to use

  • Write what you plan to work on, and how you can innovate in your final project

  • Describe as needed, in particular for CFP:

    • Project plan, relevant existing literature, data that you will use, how you will evaluate your work

Project Proposal: Critical Reading

  • Skill: How to think critically about a research paper

    • What were the main novel contributions?
    • Is the work general and reusable or a special case?
    • Are there flaws or neat details in what they did?
    • How does it fit with other papers on similar topics?
    • Does it provoke good questions on further or different things to try?

Project Proposal: Planning Tips

  • How to do a good job on your project plan?

    • You need to have an overall sensible idea

    • But most project plans are lacking in nuts-and-bolts:

      • Do you have your data? Can you collect it quickly?
      • Do you have a realistic evaluation plan? Is it convincing?
      • Do you have appropriate baselines?

Project Writeup

Writeup quality is very important to your grade!

Sample Project Example 1

Sample Project Example 2

Sample Project Example 3

Plan To Use It in Your Portfolio

Plan To Use It in Your Portfolio

Example: From Class Project to Research Impact

  • https://github.com/VIDA-NYU/pycalibrate

  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.13770.pdf

This project started as a class visualization project, became an open-source library, and resulted in a published paper. Your project could follow a similar trajectory!

Project Timeline

Milestone Due Date Details
Proposal Oct 13 2-3 pages, includes paper summary + plan
Mid-term Presentation Oct 20 5-minute presentation, show progress
Final Presentation Dec 1 & Dec 8 10-minute presentation + Q&A
Final Report Dec 11 6-8 pages (conference paper format)

Evaluation Criteria

Technical Quality (60%)

  • Soundness of approach
  • Appropriate evaluation
  • Depth of analysis
  • Innovation beyond baseline

Presentation (15%)

  • Clarity of slides
  • Quality of demo/visualizations
  • Handling of Q&A

Writeup (20%)

  • Clear motivation and contributions
  • Proper related work
  • Effective visualizations
  • Insightful discussion

Teamwork (5%)

  • Equal contribution (for teams)
  • Clear division of labor
  • Collaboration evidence

Default Project Topics

Will be announced on Discord this week!

Potential themes:

  • Model interpretability visualization
  • High-dimensional data exploration
  • Interactive ML debugging tools
  • Fairness and bias visualization
  • Time-series model visualization
  • Embedding space exploration

Each DFP topic will include a reference paper, dataset suggestions, and baseline approaches.

Getting Help

Office Hours:

  • Instructor office hours: Mondays 3-4 PM (Room 1153, 370 Jay St)
  • TA office hours: Posted on Discord

Resources:

  • Discord #project-discussion channel
  • Weekly check-ins during lab sessions
  • Mid-term presentation feedback

Don’t wait until the last minute!

Tips for Success

  1. Start Early - Don’t wait until after Thanksgiving!

  2. Iterate - Build simple version first, then improve

  3. Visualize Often - Make plots to understand your data/results

  4. Document - Keep notes, screenshots for your writeup

  5. Test on Real Users - Get feedback on your visualizations

  6. Version Control - Use Git, commit frequently

  7. Communicate - Keep your team and mentors updated

Questions?

Discord: #project-discussion

Email: Claudio Silva (csilva@nyu.edu)

Office Hours: Mondays 3-4 PM (Room 1153, 370 Jay St)