CE901 or CE902 CSEE MSc Project and Dissertation Handbook  | University of Essex

1. Introduction

This section is addressed to all taught MSc students.  An important feature of your course is that you will be expected to propose, plan, design, implement and report on, both in writing and orally, a project, to professional standards, under the supervision of a member of staff. You should read the module description for CE901 or CE902 in this Handbook.  In this section there are notes on the role of the supervisor and assessment of your dissertation. Further information, which you must look out for, will be posted on the Course Materials Repository, the postgraduate notice board and by e-mail at key times throughout the year.

Method of Assessment

CE901 breakdown of assessment:

• Dissertation (90%) submitted in week 48 or week XX (depending on start date) 
• Presentation (10%) to take place in weeks 49-50, or weeks XX-YY (depending on start date) 

Supervisor and Supervision

At the end of your first term, you will be assigned a supervisor, whose task will be to guide you through the process of proposing, conducting and writing up your project. Your supervisor will inform you of the timetable and other arrangements for supervision for work to be carried out during the summer or autumn term immediately after the examinations.  This normally involves regular meetings during normal term time and at least once every two weeks during the summer.  However, you must make arrangements to cover periods when the supervisor is away from the University for any extended period, especially during the summer months.

2.The Project 

A full proposal for your project (which you will begin in the first week of the spring term) forms part of the assessed coursework for CE902 Professional Practice and Research Methodology and must be submitted in the last week of the spring term. You will receive guidance in the preparation of the proposal from your supervisor.  

After your examinations, you will continue with the project.  This will involve, over a short period of time, the implementation and testing of your project.  This will involve writing software and/or building hardware (where appropriate).  By careful planning you should know by the start of the project which programming language and platform you are going to use.  Ensure they are available within the School so that you can demonstrate your work during the presentation.

You should set personal milestones for your project and a date by which you hope to have passed each of them.  Consider your progress frequently and take advice from your supervisor.  

It is good practice to keep an up-to-date diary of the project to see how you are progressing; it may be that your objectives need to be modified in the light of unforeseen problems.  We expect you to use the CSEE code repository to store all outputs (eg. Code) from your project, and the CSEE Jira site to manage your project and record all meetings with your supervisor (more information will be provided on this).

3.The Written Dissertation

The dissertation is the most important deliverable of your project; remember this when time is rapidly being consumed by programming or hardware development. It is quite possible you may not be able to achieve all your goals. In this case, it is better to write a good dissertation on a limited set of objectives which have been accomplished rather than a poor dissertation on (many) items of unfinished work. You can always discuss these incomplete items in a ‘conclusions and further work’ chapter. No study is ever completely finished, even at PhD level; new material becomes available all the time.  It is noted that you can reuse your material in your research proposal. 

When writing your dissertation, you should remember that it will be read by examiners whose knowledge of your particular project may be less than your own.  Your reader will not have spent the same amount of time on the project as you, so make the assumption that they are not familiar with the topic. Clarify the chapter and subsection structure early in the life of the project.  Pay particular attention to a clear explanation of the general background to the project as well as your specific objectives.  Avoid too much jargon and define clearly any technical terms before you use them.  Check your writing thoroughly for spelling and grammar mistakes.  
 
If English is not your first language then ask a native speaker to proof read a draft BEFORE you submit it to your supervisor. Use your supervisor for constructive comments on a complete draft of your dissertation and leave yourself plenty of time to make changes which your supervisor might suggest. Failure to do this will probably result in a lower quality dissertation with the subsequent loss of marks. The marking guidelines to be used by your assessors will be made available to you and will be discussed in supervision.  Your final dissertation will be assessed by your supervisor and an independent internal assessor. The recommended length is between 10,000 and 15,000 words.

3.1 Recommended Structure of Dissertation

Some of the important sections of the dissertation are discussed below in the order in which they appear in the finished document.  Note that this is usually not the best order in which to write them, for example, the Introduction is best written late when you have a clear overview of all the material you are introducing. 

Abstract

The dissertation should begin with an abstract of not more than 200 words in which the objectives and achievements are briefly described.  This should be included as the first page in each copy of your dissertation (after the title page). 

Table of Contents 

The contents section displays the structure of your dissertation and contains the chapter and major subsection headings with corresponding page numbers.  Do not be tempted to make the contents too detailed - it is not an index - two pages should be sufficient.  Begin the contents at an early stage and keep it under continuous development.  Finish it at a late stage to make sure references to page numbers are accurate.

Introduction

The introduction prepares the ground for the more detailed discussion in the following chapters; it should set out briefly but clearly the domain, motivation and goals of the project.  Your introduction will be read thoroughly by your assessors to obtain an overview of your work.  This is an opportunity to create a good initial impression of the entire dissertation.  

Main Body

The chapters in the main body of the dissertation will depend upon the technical details of the project. It should include the details on the applied methodology, design and implementation of the project, as well as project valuation methods, experiments results and reflection of results. 

Determine how many chapters are appropriate and what should be included in each.  As always discuss it with your supervisor. 

Project and Risk Management

This section presents how the project is managed and with the use of the Jira/GitLab tools. In addition, it presents the risk management process used to identify, evaluate and mitigate the potential risks associated with the project. The coverage of the project context for proposed solutions is also to be presented, which evidence some originality and meet a combination of societal, user, business and customer needs as appropriate. The project context will involve consideration of applicable health and safety, diversity, inclusion, cultural, societal, environmental and commercial matters, codes of practice and industry standards. 

Conclusions / Further work

In this section you should state the technical achievements of your project.  Suggest how you might have improved the results if you tackled the project in the light of your experience with it.  Suggest how your work might be extended. 

Appendices

All additional information, and relevant tables and diagrams must be included in the dissertation or in a separate file.  Tables and figures should be included within the text; they should be numbered and given an explanatory title. Rather than include your program code as an appendix, you can link to your project on the GitLab repository and share this with your supervisor and second assessor.

3.2 Dissertation Layout

Dissertations should be presented using 11-point Times New Roman font with line spacing of 1.2 lines.  Margins should be at least 2 cm, on all four sides.  The pages of text, including inserted equations and diagrams, must be numbered consecutively at the bottom centre of each page. Equations and diagrams should be generated by you. You should avoid copying and pasting these from other sources unless the diagram is highly complicated.

3.3 Important - using references in your dissertation

Reference to relevant published work is an important part of your dissertation.  If you are summarising or discussing the work of others, it must be acknowledged in the text and the work referenced in your Bibliography.  This includes work of others you have obtained from the Internet including any code you have used.  It is plagiarism not to make such acknowledgements, accidentally or deliberately.  You need to be careful; otherwise you may be in breach of University Examination Regulations.  The section ‘Cheating (Plagiarism)’ in the ‘Academic Offences’ section of this Handbook applies particularly to project dissertations.  This may require careful discussion with your supervisor.

The following information should be included in a Bibliography: author(s); article title; publication title; place of publication; publication date and page numbers. There are a number of accepted styles for a Bibliography such as Harvard, Vancouver etc.  One such style (‘Harvard’) is described here.

Within the text you should refer to a published paper or book by the author’s surname followed by the year of publication, for example, Palaniappan (2008).  
Where you refer to two or more papers published by the same author(s) in the same year you should add an identifying letter, e.g. Wilson and Palaniappan (2009a).     
Where there are two authors they should be written as, for example, Balli and Palaniappan (2009); three or more authors need only be specified by giving the first author’s surname followed by et al e.g. Palaniappan et al (2002).  

For journal articles you should specify the journal title, date, volume and page numbers; for books you should specify the title, publisher, date and place of publication.  

References to material obtained from the WWW, including code incorporated in your implementation, should be checked that they are still available due to their transient nature. The date the material was accessed should be given. 

The general principle is to provide sufficient information for the interested reader to identify and obtain the paper, book or report you have cited.  If in doubt, as always, discuss in supervision.

A typical example of a bibliography is:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Palaniappan, R., Raveendran, P., Nishida, S., and Saiwaki, N. (2002) ‘A new brain-computer interface design using fuzzy ARTMAP’, IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 140-148.
Balli, T. and Palaniappan, R. (2009) ‘Nonlinear approach to brain signal modelling’, published in Khosrow-Pour, M. (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, 2nd ed., IGI Global, Hershey, USA, vol. 6, pp. 2834-2839.

Palaniappan, R. (2009) ‘Vision related brain activity for biometric authentication’, In Proceedings of 32nd Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, 7-10 Nov. 2006, Paris, France, pp. 3227-3231.

3.4 Cover Page of Dissertation

Full Title of the Thesis

<insert your name here>

<insert your registration number here>

3.5 Submission of the Dissertation

Your submission should contain a digital version of the report ideally in PDF format

The school will provide you with access to a source code repository where you can store and share any code developed by your project. These program listings of your implementation should be accessible to your supervisor (full instructions will be provided during the year).

4. Oral Presentation 

The oral presentation allows you to show that you understand the project and your contribution to it and to demonstrate that the deliverables, as described in the dissertation, exist.  

The demonstration must be carried out within the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering and your attention is drawn to the use of computing facilities outside the School (see ‘Laboratories and Equipment’).  You will be required to present your work to your supervisor and an independent internal assessor.  Your presentation should last approximately 20-30 minutes and, using whatever visual aids are appropriate, you should:

Explain the main points of your work, stating clearly your objectives and achievements:

• demonstrate any software/hardware deliverables; 
• be prepared to answer questions. 

As with all deliverables your presentation should be discussed with your supervisor beforehand.

5. Intellectual Property Rights and the MSc Project

Some MSc projects generate Intellectual Property.  That is, they constitute a system or an invention with a market value, or the possibility of being developed into such.  In many cases this will not become clear until the project is completed, or nearly completed. In some other cases a student may be aiming to provide a service or system for a potential client from the outset of their work.

It is most important that as soon as it becomes clear to a student, or their supervisor, that their project may constitute exploitable intellectual property, that they contact the School’s Director of Industrial Liaison, or alternatively the Head of School.