Students will be evaluated across the following four types of assignments.
- Weekly paper reviews
- Paper presentations (at least once per semester)
- Paper debate (at least once per semester)
- Research project
See this link for details on submitting your assignments.
Paper Reviews (30%)
Every week, you will read one to two research papers. Prior to each class, you will submit a written review that critiques the assigned reading materials, including:
- A summary of the paper:
- What problem the paper is trying to solve
- Why this problem is important
- What method the paper uses
- What the results are
- Stregnths of the paper
- Areas of improvement
Submit the reviews by the end of Wednesday. I will grade them Thursday morning.
See also: How to read scientific papers: https://nymity.ch/book/#reading
Paper Presentations (30%)
Every week, a student will sign up for paper presentation. Each student will give a 20-minute presentation on one of the paper that week.
Each presentation should clearly outline the following contents:
- What problem the paper is trying to solve
- Why this problem is important
- Whether anyone else has done similar work
- What method the paper uses
- What the results are
- Whether the method and results are good
Two days before the presentation (i.e., by the end of the Tuesday preceding the class), the presenter should share the Google Slides with the instructor, who will provide feedback on the slide deck.
Each student is expected to do at least one paper presentation. For students who do two presentations, the presentation grade will be an average of the two presentations, plus an additional 10-point extra credits as an incentive.
Class Participation (10%)
Students are expected to actively speak up in class (preferably) or via Slack during paper discussions. For more effective communication, students are encouraged (although not required) to turn on their cameras when they speak.
Course Projects (30%)
Your course project should address an important, interesting open problem related to IoT security and privacy. I’m happy to discuss your project ideas individually and help you refine them. I recommend working individually or in groups of 2 or 3. The larger the group, the more I’ll expect you to accomplish.
Checkpoint 1: Pre-Proposal Ideas (Due February 22)
Write down your preliminary ideas on this Google Doc. Clearly outline the following:
- What problem(s) do you hope to solve?
- Why are these important problems?
- How would you solve these problems? What is your method?
- What are your expected results and/or deliverables?
You may work in groups of 1, 2, or 3 people. The larger the group, the more I expect from the project. If you need particular IoT device(s), I can consider funding your project if the cost is reasonable.
Each person or group may suggest multiple ideas. The ideas can be rough and do not need to be finalized. The earlier you share, the earlier you will receive feedback from me and/or from your classmates. We will talk about these projects in class on February 25. Also, we will keep iterating on these ideas until there is a concrete idea per group.
Checkpoint 2: Project Proposal (Due March 10)
Your proposal should consist of a 1–2 page description of your project that includes the following:
- Group: Group member names.
- Title: What would you call the eventual paper or product?
- Problem: A description of the problem you will address and why it is important.
- Related work: A survey of related work and past approaches to the problem.
- Approach: How you will address the problem, what steps you will take, and how your approach differs from past work.
- Evaluation: How you will test how well your approach works (e.g., experimental measurements).
- Timeline: What you plan to accomplish and deliver by the checkpoint and by the end of the semester.
Write in Google Doc and share the link with Danny.
Checkpoint 3: Progress Update Presentation (March 25)
Give a 15-minute presentation explaining the problem you want to work on, the most important related work, your approach, and your preliminary results. This will be an early opportunity to get feedback from the class.
Checkpoint 4: Draft of Project Report (Due April 13)
Expands upon the project proposal to answer the following questions:
- Progress: What have you accomplished so far? What do you have left to do?
- Schedule: Are you on track to complete what you proposed?
- Obstacles: Have you encountered any surprises or unexpected problems?
- Workarounds: If you’re having problems, how do you intend to solve them or work around them?
- Preliminary results: Can you draw any preliminary conclusions from your results so far? Include data.
Expected length is at least four pages.
Checkpoint 5: Project Presentation (May 6)
Each group or individual will give a Zoom presentation about their results, in the style of a brief conference talk, open to the public. These will be rapid fire talks; you’ll have 13 minutes to speak and 5-7 minutes for questions.
Final Paper (Due May 18)
Your final project report should be written in the style of a workshop or conference submission, like most of the papers we have read this semester. Please include at least the following:
- An abstract that summarizes your work.
- An introduction that motivates the problem you are trying to solve.
- A related work section that differentiates your contributions.
- Section(s) describing your architecture or methodology.
- Results and/or evaluation section(s), with data or figures to support your claims as appropriate.
- A brief future work section explaining what is left to do.
- Appropriate citations and references from the literature.
See also: Advice on writing technical articles.
This is a firm deadline, as this is the last day for all NYU exams.
Submitting Your Work for Publication (Optional)
You should consider submitting your results to a technical workshop. There are several workshops held annually in conjunction with USENIX Security that have deadlines in late April and May. I’ll be glad to advise you further in preparation for submission.
Note: The design of the course project is borrowed from Roya Ensafi’s class. I copied and pasted some of her text here :)