Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 15:20:46 -0600 (CST)
From: "Havlicek, Joseph P" <Joseph.P.Havlicek-1@ou.edu>
Subject: PROJECTS
To: Joseph.P.Havlicek-1@ou.edu


Ladies & Gentlemen:

I said this in class yesterday, but since so many
people are missing class I thought it would be
a good idea to send it by email as well.

I want to make sure that everyone understands a couple of things about the 
term project, because not understanding them could result in your getting a 
very low grade.

You should read the syllabus where it describes the term project.  In 
particular, the syllabus explains that:

1) your project must have significant creative activity.  This means that 
there has to be some part of the project that is *yours*, that is not simply 
reporting about what others have done.  For the most part, you have all turned 
in proposals that deal with good problems in image processing.    However, 
very few of you actually told me in the proposal what it is that you plan to 
do.  Even fewer of you wrote about what would be the creative component of 
your project.  It is important for everyone to think about this, because you 
cannot get a good grade on the project if it does not have a creative 
component.

2) It also says in the syllabus that "The standards of academic honesty given 
above for homework apply to the term project as well."

THIS IS EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY IMPORTANT.  When you do research type work and 
write about it, you MUST BE ABSOLUTELY CLEAR about what was done by others 
and what was done by you.

For example, many of you have written in your proposal things like "we then 
considered the image to be a stochastic markov field and applied the ICM 
algorithm to obtain the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimates."  The problem 
is:  this claims that YOU were one of the original authors!

YOU MUST NOT DO THIS!  YOU MUST SAY "THEY", not "WE". If it is discovered 
that you have written something like this in a paper published by the IEEE, 
you will kicked out of the IEEE and banned from ever publishing in IEEE again.

Technically speaking, to write something like this on a paper that you turn in 
for a class is plagiarism; the usual punishment is an "F" grade in the class, 
community service, and a formal reprimand placed in your permanent file.

Along the same lines, some of you have also scanned figures out of a paper 
and put them in your proposal without citing the original source.  That too 
is serious plagiarism, even if you redraw the figure yourself.  The same goes 
for mathematical derivations... even if you change around the symbols and 
retype it yourself, you MUST give reference back to the papers where you 
found the material.

It is simple to avoid all of these problems:  make sure that you give credit 
to others for the work that they have done.  When you describe someone else's 
work, cite the paper!  And be very very clear about what parts of the work 
being reported were done by others, what parts you did by yourself, and what 
parts you did in collaboration with others.

Then we will all be happy!

regards,

j