Project (capstone) Seminar:

• The goal of the course is to develop a project on scientific grounds from the subjects presented at the preceding courses of the specialization. 
• A capstone project is a multifaceted assignment that serves as a "culminating academic and intellectual experience for students", typically at the end of an academic program. It should be not a purely academic exercise, but solve real-world problems based on scientific grounds.
• The student is expected to choose a topic from a predefined set of options presented at the briefing session. These topics range from the research fields and (EC-) projects) of the institute. Every topic is suited for further academic development and has potential for practical usage and for contribution to open source projects.
• In a fist step, the students have to collect systematically relevant research results from to the chosen topic to provide an overview of the the relevant literature.
• Based on the literature, a detail project proposal is formulated together with a project plan containing dates and deliverables. After the project plan is discussed and approved, the project work starts. In this phase the supervisor acts as a project mentor.
• There will be progress reports on a typical-weekly basis.
• Finally, the results of the projects are presented in a common session. The written seminar thesis (typically 15-20 pages) follows the style of a scientific paper (abstract, introduction, main contribution, related work, summary, literature).
• All students are expected to hand in their own project description as well as comment (review) upon a fellow student’s description. Students are expected to attend all appointed seminar meetings and to participate in the discussions.

Every student writes a final term paper that should contain:

• a concise problem/goal description
• a state-of-the-art evaluation (literature, projects)
• a novel contribution
• an evaluation (what are the properties of the developed contribution)

It is a goal that the developed software components can be provided as contributions for existing open source components.

Schedule:

• First Session: Presentation and Assignment of Topics
• Second Session:
  • Proposed project summary: Review of assigned topics by students, containing
  • Literature overview (list of considered materials/papers, grouped by categories "background", "highly relevant", "other approaches/related work")
  • Proposal of a work schedule (project plan deliverables with dates)
  • Working document, max 3 pages + 3 slides presentation
• Milestone 1: "First Prototype" (Software and Paper)
• Milestone 2: "Alpha Release" (Software and Paper)
• Milestone 3: "Seminar Work"
• Project Presentation

mandatory