SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND ICT
INTERNSHIP PROJECT GUIDE
PROGRAMME: BSc Honors in Information and Communication Technology
COURSE: ITP3910 – Internship Project / ITP3911 – Internship Project Presentation
Note that this is an innovative project that is different from the regular application development
project which will be carried out in the 4 year ICT4900 - Final Project courses. The main goal is
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to help the students apply machine learning algorithms to real-world tasks, or to leave them well-
qualified to start machine learning or AI research.
Your first task is to pick a project topic. If you're looking for project ideas, you can brainstorm
and suggest some project ideas together with your colleagues, supervisors and/or lecturers.
The algorithms to be used may be in the fields of Machine Learning, Internet of Things,
Computer Security or Virtual and Augmented Reality.
There are three kinds of suitable projects:
1. Application project. Pick an application that interests you, and explore how best to
apply suitable algorithms to solve it.
2. Algorithmic project. Pick a problem or family of problems, and develop a new
algorithm, or a novel variant of an existing algorithm, to solve it.
3. Theoretical project. Prove some interesting/non-trivial properties of a new or an existing
algorithm. (A purely theoretical project might be challenging.)
Some projects will also combine elements of applications, algorithms and theory.
Pick something that you can get excited and passionate about. Be brave rather than timid, and do
feel free to propose ambitious things that you're excited about. (Just be sure to ask us for help if
you're uncertain how to best get started.) Alternatively, if you're already working on a research or
industry project that machine learning might apply to, then you may already have a great project
idea.
A very good project will be a publishable or nearly-publishable piece of work. The project can
be submitted for publication at conferences or journals. Two of the main machine learning
conferences are ICML and NeurIPS. You can find papers from the recent
ICML [Link] and NeurIPS
conference [Link] These can help you get new ideas.
In order for students to easily be able to come up with feasible innovative project proposals, they
need up to 3 months of studying 10 to 50 recently published research papers in their area of
interest. Supervisors can play a pivotal role in assisting students at this stage. The following
websites may help you to find the appropriate papers: [Link]
[Link] [Link] [Link]
The student can then be able to identify a base paper (preferably with code) which they will need
to present to a research group to prove that they have mastered the paper and its experiments
very well. The research group consists of supervisors and other students on Internship. The
convenient time to present is agreed upon by the supervisors and the students involved. The
student can then identify significant modifications or improvements which they can be able to
contribute to their base paper. The supervisors may have to play a pivotal role in identifying the
research gap at this stage.
Another important aspect of designing your project is to identify one or several datasets suitable
for your topic of interest. If that dataset needs considerable pre-processing to suit your task, or if
you intend to collect the needed data yourself, keep in mind that this is only one part of the
expected project work, but can often take considerable time. We still expect a solid methodology
and discussion of results, so pace your project accordingly.
Notes on a few specific types of projects:
● Deep learning projects: For example, you might set up logistic regression and SVM
baselines, or do some data analysis using unsupervised methods. We prioritise
methodological and experimental rigor and standardize our grading, so note that pursuing
(or not pursuing) a deep learning project will not itself impact your grade. Finally,
training deep learning models can be very time consuming, so make sure you have the
necessary computing resources.
● Preprocessed datasets: While we don't want you to have to spend much time collecting
raw data, the process of inspecting and visualizing the data, trying out different types of
preprocessing, and doing error analysis is often an important part of machine learning.
Hence if you choose to use pre-prepared datasets (e.g. from Kaggle, the UCI machine
learning repository, etc.) we encourage you to do some data exploration and analysis to
get familiar with the problem.
● Replicating results: Replicating the results in a paper can be a good way to learn.
However, we ask that instead of just replicating a paper, also try using the technique on
another application, or do some analysis of how each component of the model contributes
to final performance. In other words, your project does not need to be completely novel,
but should not just duplicate previous work done by others.
Project Parts: Proposal, Milestone, Poster, and Final Report
This section contains the detailed instructions for the different parts of your project.
Submission: Submit to your supervisor using recommended platforms.
Evaluation
The poster and final report will combine to be the majority of the grade. Projects will be
evaluated based on:
● The technical quality of the work. (i.e., Does the technical material make sense? Are the
things tried reasonable? Are the proposed algorithms or applications clever and
interesting? Do the authors convey novel insight about the problem and/or algorithms?
Does the project have sufficient scope for the given team size?)
● Originality. (Did the authors add their own data processing, methods, or analysis? Does
the final project avoid being a mirror image of existing papers/projects with no net new
work?)
● Communication. (Are the authors able to clearly and effectively explain the work that
they did, including context, methods, and results? Do the paper and poster balance clarity
with rigor?)
In order to highlight these components, it is important you present a solid discussion regarding
the learnings from the development of your method, and summarising how your work compares
to existing approaches.
1. Project Proposals (At most 3 Months)(Cumulative = 3 months)
In the project proposal, you'll pick a project idea to work on early and receive feedback from the
Supervisors.
In the proposal, below your project title, include the project category. The category can be one
of:
● Athletics & Sensing ● Life Sciences
Devices ● Natural Language
● Audio & Music
● Physical Sciences
● Computer Vision
● Theory & Reinforcement
● Finance & Commerce Learning
● General Machine ● Virtual and Augmented Reality
Learning ● Internet of Things
● Computer Security
Format: Your proposal should be a PDF/Word document, giving the title of the project, the
project category, the full names of all of your team members, the Student IDs of your team
members, and a 300-500 word description of what you plan to do.
Your project proposal should include the following information:
● Motivation: What problem are you tackling and why? Is this an application or a
theoretical result?
● Novelty: What research gap is being filled by your idea?
● Method: What machine learning techniques (or otherwise) are you planning to apply or
improve upon?
● Intended experiments: What experiments are you planning to run? How do you plan to
evaluate your machine learning algorithm?
● Progression: What are the stages to be followed up to completion of the project?
Presenting pointers to one relevant dataset and one example of prior research on the topic are a
valuable (optional) addition.
Grading: The project proposal is mainly intended to make sure you decide on a project topic and
get feedback from Supervisors early. As long as your proposal follows the instructions above and
the project seems to have been thought out with a reasonable plan, you should do well on the
proposal.
0. Milestone (At most 2 months)(Cumulative = 5 months)
The milestone will help you make sure you're on track, and should describe what you've
accomplished so far, and very briefly say what else you plan to do. You should write it as if it's
an “early draft" of what will turn into your final project. You can write it as if you're writing the
first few pages of your final project report, so that you can re-use most of the milestone text in
your final report. Please write the milestone (and final report) keeping in mind that the intended
audience are the Supervisors. Thus, for example, you should not spend two pages explaining
what logistic regression is. Your milestone should include the full names of all your team
members and state the full title of your project. Note: We will expect your final writeup to be on
the same topic as your milestone.
Contributions: Please include a section that describes what each team member worked on and
contributed to the project. This is to make sure team members are carrying a fair share of the
work for projects.
Grading: The milestone is mostly intended to get feedback from Supervisors to make sure
you’re making reasonable progress. As long as your milestone follows the instructions above and
you seem to have tested any assumptions which might prevent your team from completing the
project, you should do well on the milestone.
Format: Your milestone should be at most 3 pages, excluding references. Similar to the
proposal, it should include
● Motivation: What problem are you tackling, and what's the setting you're considering?
● Method: What machine learning techniques (or otherwise) have you tried and why?
● Preliminary experiments: Describe the experiments that you've run, the outcomes, and
any error analysis that you've done. You should have tried at least one baseline.
● Next steps: Given your preliminary results, what are the next steps that you're
considering?
0. Poster (At most 3 months)(Cumulative = 8 months)[submitted at end of Internship]
Format: See attached Poster Guidelines (please note that 36x24in means 36in wide by 24in tall,
i.e. it's better if your poster is formatted landscape).
Grading: Despite some examples given in the guidelines, posters with nice, illustrative figures
are preferred over posters with lots of text.
Final Writeup (At most 4 months)(Cumulative = 12 months)
Work very hard, work smart and be extremely careful to give each writeup ample attention, and
read and try very hard to understand everything you describe in it. Pay meticulous attention to
every detail. This is the paper to be presented in 4 year 1 semester. Presentation skills, oral
th st
defence and presentation of a working model (or equivalent depending on the type of project)
will be assessed.
Format: Final project write-ups can be at most 8 pages long (including appendices and figures).
We will allow for extra pages containing only references. If you did this work in collaboration
with someone else, or if someone else (such as another professor) had advised you on this work,
your write-up must fully acknowledge their contributions. For shared projects, we also require
that you submit the final report from the group you're sharing the project with.
A more detailed guideline with a rough outline of what we expect to see in the final report is
attached.
Contributions: Please include a section that describes what each team member worked on and
contributed to the project. We may reach out and factor in contributions and evaluations when
assigning project grades.
Code: Please include a link to a Github repository or zip file with the code for your final project.
You do not have to include the data or additional libraries (so if you submit a zip file, it should
not exceed 5MB).
Grading: The final report will be judged based on the clarity of the report, the relevance of the
project to the topics mentioned in this Guide, the novelty of the problem, and the technical
quality and significance of the work.
When the Final Writeup has been approved by the Supervisor, the student will need to proceed to
refine the theories, formulas and experiments, depending on the nature of the project. The
student will then write the paper and publish the results or patent their ideas and/or prototype.
The supervisors will play a crucial role in such processes.
The public parts of the working project can be deployed on an online cloud system such as the
following:
[Link] [Link] [Link]
services/, [Link]
The following Elsevier and IEEE (or other approved) templates may be used by the student when
compiling the manuscript:
IEEE Word and Latex Manuscript Templates
[Link]
Elsevier Latex Instructions
[Link]
Elsevier Word Template
[Link]
Journals indexed on Web of Science are recommended for publications. Use the following link to
check if a journal is indexed on Web of Science: [Link]
To check if your manuscript is indexed in the ISI Web of Science, you can log on to the
following url [Link] Once you log in you can simply search by the full journal
name or the ISSN number. The search result will show if your target journal is indexed in SCI,
SCI-E, or ESCI. Please note that all SCI, SCI-E, or ESCI indexed journals are under the ISI web
of science database.
To check if your target journal is indexed in Scimago please log on
to [Link] and search for your journal. This search engine
is powered by Scopus and hence you should be verifying if your target journal is indexed in
Scopus as well.
If you need expert recommendations and in-depth information about the journals best suited for
your manuscript, check out Editage’s professional Journal Selection service.