CSCI 4830-800 (Research On-ramp) Course Materials for Spring 2026:
Office hours:
Tuesdays 1:30-2:30pm in person (ECOT 747),
Fridays 2:30-3:30pm by
zoom and at
other times by appointment; please email me if you'd like to arrange a
meeting time outside the set hours. It's a good idea to check my
homepage before joining
office hours in case I've had to reschedule them because of some other
meeting (or move them to zoom).
Class Materials:
- 14 January: Logistics, introductions, course philosophy &
goals
Stuff for today's class:
Homework for next time:
- Free-wheeling brainstorming
- Device-free thinking time
- 21 January: I'm going to have to start this class with a
second round of logistics/intro/etc. because we have ten new people
who didn't get to the first class period; after that, I'll start
talking about how to get your arms around what's already been done in
a research area.
Stuff for today's class:
Homework for next time:
- Read this short essay by Martin Schwartz entitled "The
Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research."
- For those who added the course after the first period:
- Free-wheeling brainstorming
- Device-free thinking time
- Note: you're going to have to do those exercises ASAP
in order to catch up, since the next part of your homework
depends on their results!
- For everyone: stop by my office to discuss the ideas that
came up for you during the brainstorming exercise. I will pass
around a signup sheet for time slots at class on the 21st.
If you missed that signup sheet, email me ASAP, and no later than
COB on the 22nd.
- 28 January: Some postprocessing of the brainstorming
results and a deeper dive into how to do background research.
Stuff for today's class:
Homework for next time:
- Pick one of your ideas (doesn't matter which one) and find three
papers in the scientific literature -- that is, in journals,
conference proceedings, and/or the arxiv -- that talk about some of
the research that has been done on that idea. For each paper, turn
in the citation (title, authors, venue) and two sentences explaining
what it's about and/or why you chose it for your list. Please
submit this on Canvas before the beginning of the next class.
- 4 February: Putting it all together: zeroing in on the
problem that you want to work on (including some postprocessing of
the "stupidity" essay)
Stuff for today's class:
Homework for next time:
- Go back to your three papers and do some forward/backward
chaining to come up with a short (10-12 papers) bibliography about
previous research on your idea. In this assignment, I'd like you
to pay some attention to both the quality of the papers
(good venue? highly cited? author reputation?) and the
closeness of the match to your idea or your interest area.
Turn in a formal version of that bibliography that follows
standard scientific norms. You're welcome to use any set of
guidelines that you wish, such as
this one. (If you use other guidelines, please include a link
to them.)
- Go back to your full list from the brainstorming exercise and
do some thinking about how your thinking has evolved, now that
you've dug into the research literature a bit. (Have you homed in
on something? Changed course completely? If so, why?
What is your new problem choice?) Making some of that
thinking time "device free," as in the previous exercise, will
probably be a useful way to kick this off.
- 11 February: Finding an advisor
Stuff for today's class:
Homework for next time:
- Before 5pm on 17 February, send me an email message
outlining a project on the idea that has floated to the top during
the past few weeks and asking to meet with me to discuss it. We'll
schedule those meetings between 18-24 February. Hint: the sooner
you email me, the more choice of meeting times you'll have. (Note:
this is an exercise for the kind of cold-call email that you'll need
to execute to contact potential advisors. Please don't use LLMs for
this email composition task; we are very much aware of the kind of
tripe that comes out of ChatGPT if you ask it to do this and you
will not make a good impression if you do that.)
- Read this article from American Scientist
about advisor/advisee
interactions.
- 18 February: Working with your advisor and a brief detour
into a specific undergraduate research project on interpolation,
graph search, and dance
Stuff for today's class:
Homework for next time:
- Send a professional follow-up email to me about our meeting to
close the loop. Make sure it says something specific and salient
about the conversation at that meeting, your thinking since then,
etc. (Ditto on the use of GenAI here. Don't do it.)
- Dig through the homepages of faculty in the CS department to see
who does research that's related to your interests. Choose a few
-- no more than three, please -- and turn in their names, together
with a few sentences about why you chose each person.
- 25 February: Proposals (including a brief
overview of programs at CU that support undergrad research).
Homework for next time:
- Read through the "Project Proposal" guidelines in the "Individual
Project Grants" section of
the UROP page, which you
can find under the "Applying" dropdown. (Here's
the
direct link if you have trouble navigating through this thicket of
webpages and dropdowns on that page.)
- Start thinking about what you might put in each section of the
proposal.
- Write down your thoughts and questions about this process and
bring them to class.
- 4 March: Writing about research: Organizing and presenting
your ideas -- and a bit about chaos theory.
Stuff for today's class:
Homework for next time:
- Put together short chunks of text to go in all the slots that
are outlined in
the
"Proposal on One Page" section of the UROP webpage. (Note:
you may have to make up some content here because you may not have
fully framed your idea. Have fun but try to be at least a bit
contentful.)
Do not enter these chunks of text on the UROP site.
Rather, submit them in a single document, on Canvas, with each
chunk clearly labeled as to where it fits in: e.g., "Context &
Objectives, prompt 1." Make sure you follow the instructions and
adhere to the wordcount limits.
- 11 March: Creating research posters -- and a bit more about
chaos theory.
Stuff for today's class:
- My lecture slides
- Links to the websites about posters that I showed in class:
Homework for next time:
- Roam around the Engineering Center and check out some of the
research posters that people have hanging on the walls
outside their offices. Email me a picture of one that you really
liked and a sentence or two about why you chose it.
- Create a rough draft of your poster in block diagram/storyboard
form and submit it on Canvas. (There is an example in today's slides
for what I mean by "block diagram/storyboard.")
- 25 March: Oral research presentations.
Stuff for today's class:
Homework for next time:
- Create a full draft of your poster, with all the blocks filled
in (text, pictures, etc.) and submit it on Canvas. This should be
2' by 3'. As in the UROP proposal exercise, you may have to make
up some content here because you may not have fully framed your
idea. Have fun but try to be at least a bit contentful!
Borrowing images, data, and other content is fine for this
exercise (since the point is the poster design) but make sure that
you give proper attribution on anything that you borrow.
- 1 April: Creating research presentations: finish talking
about slides.
Stuff for today's class:
Homework for next time:
- Finish your poster and get it printed via the ITLL printing
center. Please check your email for instructions on how to do
this!
- 8 April: Poster session (with Voodoo Doughnuts)
Homework for next time:
- Go back to your observations about how the lecturers in your
other classes approached slide design and send me a short email
about what worked well (and not so well, if you wish). No names,
please!
- Read the two presentation hints handouts listed under the March
25th entry above and look over the three websites under the April
1st entry about presentation design. Using that information,
create a short (2-5 slide) powerpoint or keynote deck about your
idea. Please submit a pdf of this deck on Canvas.
- 15 April: Resumes and webpages; Next steps: internships,
thesis, grad school, careers, ...
Stuff for today's class:
Homework (due the last day of classes):
- Build a webpage about you and your research and email me the
link. Make sure to put your resume on it. (Note: the physical design
of my webpage is pitiful. Don't model yours after it. You can do
much better!)
- 22 April: GenAI issues
Homework for next time: