Unsuitable Project Topics The Examiners are concerned that some of the topics chosen for Part II and Diploma projects are unsuitable for Cambridge students, and unlikely to lead to a satisfactory dissertation. In 2005 we considered the 20 projects ranked lowest in the final results, and have identified common features of some unsuitable projects. We advise against these projects being chosen in future years, and describe the attributes that in our opinion led to the problem. One of the most important attributes for a successful Tripos or Diploma project is already well known by overseers and Directors of Studies, and is emphasised to students in briefing material. This is that it must be possible to clearly identify two phases in the technical work: firstly a core element of the project that is definitely achievable, and that would, in itself, form the basis of a good dissertation; and secondly an extension element that is likely to be within the abilities of a Cambridge undergraduate. The projects that we have identified as unsuitable choices failed to satisfy one or both of these criteria. Examples follow: Applying genetic algorithms to the game of Go There is no satisfactory partial solution to this problem. Simply encoding the rules of Go is not a sufficiently challenging project as a core project. The extension problem, creating an adequate computer Go player, is well known to be a research problem that has frustrated professional researchers for many years, so is unlikely to be within reach of an undergraduate. Advanced fee fraud email analysis The core part of the project either assumes changes to basic Internet protocols, so could not realistically be deployed on a scale suitable for testing, or is a simple dataset reading exercise. No suitable dataset was available. A successful extension would constitute automated prediction of large-scale social behaviour in a manner that has not yet resulted in successful research results. Joystick control of motorised stage The core part of the project is a basic electronic interfacing problem, and insufficiently challenging. No extension was identified that would bring any part of the Tripos syllabus to bear. Distributed trust management There are no metrics by which the core part of the project could be evaluated for success without undertaking a huge user study. No suitable dataset is available, and obtaining one would involve large-scale technical work. Once again, a successful extension would require prediction of large-scale social behaviour. Microsoft Word document cleaner Core part requires reverse engineering of a proprietary format. Even if fully successful, there is little of interest that can be said in the dissertation beyond the simple fact that it was achieved. Heartbeat pattern analysis (and other projects involving corpus analysis) The real interest in such projects is in the data, rather than the software built to analyse it. The core elements include reading the data format in which the corpus is obtained, and implementing basic analysis algorithms, neither of which is sufficiently challenging. Novel analysis results may represent a research contribution in some other field (medicine, for example), but will not attract additional credit for the dissertation. Context aware media player The core element, constructing an MP3 player, can be easily achieved using standard Java libraries and/or many open source implementations. The extension to automatically anticipate user preferences has been an active research topic with little progress over many years. It is unlikely that an undergraduate would make any progress without large scale user studies, substantial innovation in HCI theory or a novel technical approach, none of which had been identified at the outset. Recommendation It is the Director of Studies who is in the best position to assess whether a project is suitable for a particular student, although project overseers are able to warn both the student and Director of Studies when the topic itself, or the way in which it is approached, seem likely to lead to trouble. In at least one case this year, overseers strongly advised against a choice of topic, but the student and DOS chose not to take this advice. The resulting dissertation was awarded nearly the lowest mark this year. The Examiners in 2005 believe that choice of topic is critical to the success of projects, and strongly recommend that overseers and DOSes do their best to warn students away from topics like those above. If students persist with unsuitable topics, they are very likely to receive a dissertation mark near the bottom of the class. Alan Blackwell Steven Hand David Greaves (CS Tripos and Diploma Examiners 2005)