SMCClab Sound, Music, and Creative Computing at ANU

Honours, Master, and Project Expectations

This page is about setting expectations for Honours, Master, and project students. If you’re reading this, you’re probably an Honours, Master or project student who has recently started in the SMCClab — welcome! You might also be just browsing to get an idea of what studying in the SMCClab is like — that’s ok too!

Welcome! Great to have you here!

You’re now part of a research lab, a loose network of academics and students at different levels.

  • Sometimes we have a formal project (e.g., Charles is my supervisor).
  • Sometimes we have a collaboration (e.g., I’m working on a paper with Yichen and Charles).
  • Sometimes it’s part of a job (e.g., I’m a research assistant working for Henry).
  • Sometimes we just participate (e.g., I’m going to go to Ben’s seminar today to hear about live coding).

The makeup of a lab changes rapidly as folks start and finish projects and the way we work tends to change as well over time.

Expectations for students and supervisors

As a student you can expect the following:

  • individual meetings when needed (but not every week)
  • lab meetings to show what you have done and hear about others’ work
  • access to important information and materials (but not necessarily huge GPUs)
  • feedback on your project plan and implementation
  • feedback on thesis/report drafts in 5 business days
  • questions answered in 1 business day (during work hours only)
  • realistic feedback about quality of written work and software/hardware artefacts
  • help and kindness when things go wrong

As a supervisor I expect:

  • students to show up to scheduled meetings
  • students to take planning seriously
  • students to help each other and share information
  • draft thesis/reports to be sent 2 weeks before any deadline
  • patience when asking questions or sending emails out of business hours

Meeting types

To avoid mutual time wasting it’s better to book meetings when they are needed, e.g., to discuss the results of an experiment or give feedback on some writing. We have three types of meetings in the lab:

The weekly status meeting

This is a group meeting, online, once per week. In each meeting you will be asked three questions:

  1. What progress have you made?
  2. What obstacles have you encountered?
  3. What is your next step?

Purpose: (1) to gain an understanding of how everybody in the lab is going with their project, and (2) to determine if anybody requires individual meetings. Status meetings will be only 30 minutes (approx 3 minutes each).

On-demand individual meeting (≤ 30 minutes)

This is an individual meeting, either online or in-person. Book a time through Microsoft Bookings. These will have a specific goal e.g.:

  • talk about possible solutions to problem X
  • fix technical issue Y
  • discuss an ethics protocol
  • analyse results to an experiment

Student and supervisor should know exactly what we are going to discuss.

Seminars

A group meeting for delivering information with relevance to multiple people. Examples:

  • how to structure a report/thesis in LaTeX
  • how to apply for an ethics protocol
  • how to run a user study
  • research topics in musical machine learning

The shape of a project

  1. Getting started — defining research topic and objectives, background reading, finding your “unsolved problem”, discovering code frameworks.
  2. The Work — coding up a system, iterating on a design, running experiments.
  3. The Write-up — expressing your process, analysing and discussing results, writing documentation and packaging code.

Grades for Honours, Master and other projects are generally based on a combination of your written report, artefact, and presentations. Your grade is not based on your results — examiners look for your ability to understand and synthesise existing research, create an artefact skillfully, and perform experiments or critically engage with your research problem.

Project Planning

For a two-semester (24 week) project, a good project plan might look something like this:

  • Getting started: Weeks 1-12 (first 50%)
  • The Work: Weeks 6-18 (middle 50%)
  • The Write-up: Week 6, weeks 10-12, and weeks 19-24 (a bit in the middle and last 25%)

1-Semester Project deadlines:

  • End of week 6: Draft of report Introduction and Background sections (and draft code repository)
  • End of week 8: Draft of report System Design section
  • Start of week 11: Draft full report

2-Semester Project deadlines:

  • S1, end of week 6: Draft of report Introduction
  • S1, end of week 8: Draft of report Background section
  • S1, end of week 11: Draft code repository and/or report System Design sections
  • S2, end of week 6: Draft of Experimental Methodology and Results sections
  • S2, end of week 8: Full report, draft 1
  • S2, end of week 11: Full report, draft 2

Ethics Approval

If you are studying humans (surveys, questionnaires, user studies) you need ethics approval.

All Australian National University researchers (staff or students) who intend on conducting research involving the collection of data from human participants need to apply for ANU Human Ethics approval before starting their data collection.

  • Gaining ethics approval is an important part of research work.
  • Many CS student projects do not need user studies to be successful.
  • Consider what “evaluation” looks like early in your project (especially 1-semester projects).
  • Ethics approval should be done in first semester of 2-semester projects or before week 6 in 1-semester projects.

Conclusions

  • Communication and critical analysis of your project is the most important aspect of grading.
  • Expect the “work” to take a long time — prioritise getting this started early.
  • Start the write-up as soon as you start your project.
  • Meetings are precious — most issues can be handled in team meetings. Individual meetings only for critical issues.
  • Studies with humans require ethics approval — no exceptions.