Grading

Details:

• Project: The goal of this component is to give you the opportunity to get hands-on experience with a concrete problem related to real-time and fault-tolerant computing. The project will be performed individually (for grad students) or in teams of 2 students (for undergrads). Each student/team will prepare a project proposal in consultation with the lecturer. Further, the teams will be responsible for frequent progress reports, demos, a term paper, and a final presentation. The projects can cover a variety of problems, ranging from real-time operating systems, to real-time scheduling and communication, to robotics and mobile computing systems. The focus of the projects will be on applications of or issues in wireless/mobile ad-hoc systems and sensor networks. Students will have access to a variety of equipment, including an 8-node Linux cluster, sensor nodes, PDAs, laptops, etc. The project accounts for 50% of the final grade and is split up as follows: proposal (5%), progress reports (10%), draft of term paper (5%), peer review process (5%), final paper and demo of software (20%), project presentation (5%).
• Homework assignments: The homework assignments will be essential to practice the principles and concepts discussed in the lectures. There will be 6 such homeworks with short deadlines (typically one week) and they are due by the time class starts on the day specified in the assignments. For each day after the due date, 15% are lost, however, after 4 days, no credit is given. Some assignments may include small programming tasks.
• Participation:: Participation can take many forms, including active participation in lectures, paper presentations, demos at the end of the semester, etc.