AC297r Final Report Requirements

One of the deliverables for the Final is a recap of your work in the form of either a Project Report or a Website (we will refer to both as the Final Report). Talk with your TF to decide what is best for your team.

In addition, some teams have implemented client tools, software, user interfaces and/or extensive visualizations. In those cases the final report pdf or the website can be augmented by a Project Demo. The demo should be web based, interactive and meant to give a visually appealing client facing demonstration of the software, visualizations and other client tools developed by the project team as part of their project scope. The demo is not a requirement.

Content and Objectives of the Final Report

Your Final Report should stand-alone and include technical details and visualizations.

A good rule of thumb is to include what is in your presentation plus all the explaining that you plan to verbally deliver during your actual presentation.

Assume that all your descriptive content will be be read by people who are unfamiliar with your project.

Overview: Provide an overview of the project. It is important that you include a general context for and an overall description of as well as any introductory information that’s specific to the project.
Motivation: Introduce the project motivation both as a whole as well as motivations for important defining aspects of your work. Were there any visualization or UI primitives that informed your work.
Description of Data: What data are you dealing with? What methods have you used to explore the data (incl. initial explorations, models, data cleansing and reconciliation, etc)? What insights did you gain? How did those methods influence your work?
Literature Review/Related Work: This can include noting any key papers, texts, other software sources, talks or websites that you have used to develop your modeling approach and/or that informed your demo/site
Modeling Approach: What was your baseline model for comparison? What further models did you implement?
Results: Describe the results and emphasize the most important results. Did you have to reconsider some of the original assumptions?
Conclusions and Summary
Future work
Style: Your work should embrace simplicity over complexity, be intuitive for an only slightly informed user to navigate, and as much as possible be appropriately polished, robust, and reliable. Visualizations should constructed to slice through complexity and convey as information and insight elegantly and concisely. We recognize that these are not going to be fully constructed products but style matters.
Software Deployment: In some situations the demo or website will sit on top of a multi-layered software stack including software service, API, and client layers. Your team should deploy your software stack with the goal of making the final report as self-contained as possible for the duration of the evaluation period. For teams with sensitive data please think about the implications and consult the teaching staff if you have any concerns.

Example websites from last year's Capstone course

http://harvard-capstone.weebly.com/how-to-evaluate.html
http://leonhardfs.github.io/TripAdvisorProject/