Algo2 Projects

Past projects (including from other similar courses)

Summer 2021 projects: not available
Spring 2021 projects to be added soon.
COMP-150, Summer 2020
Spring 2020 projects to be added soon.
COMP-150, Summer 2019
CS-3943, Spring 2019
Summer'18 projects from COMP 150
Fall'17 projects from COMP 150 and COMP 163
Summer 2017 COMP 150
Spring 2017 COMP 150
Older COMP 163 projects
Spring 2014 COMP 260 projects
Max Goldstein's independent (i.e., just for fun) projects on Melkman's algorithm and intro to Linear Algebra.

What should your project involve?

You can implement an algorithm. In this case you should discuss any choices you made and difficulties that you encountered. Always acknowledge parts of code or ideas that you found elsewhere. If you decide to implement, you should also run some experiments, and provide a report.
You can create a visual demo of an algorithm or proof. In this case you don't need to actually implement the algorithm. It is possible to show the user what the algorithm does, while some brute-force version is running in the background. For example, if during a particular step of some algorithm you say "now we find the median" and you illustrate the median of a set of elements, your code could just have sorted instead of using median-finding.
Your demo should have lots of images and animations, examples, color, etc. Basically anything that would make the user want to find out about a topic through your demo rather than reading other available sources. Your demo should be easily accessible to everyone. Downloading some package is less attractive than a demo that can start with one click online.
Ideally your demo will be interactive. This means that the user will be able to enter input or try out multiple examples.
For demos, many students use JavaScript / Processing / d3, or equivalent. Note that this course will offer no help in learning these tools.
You can describe an algorithm, proof, or general topic in great detail, without all the demo advantages... as long as you go way deeper into non-trivial theoretical results. Don't pick a topic that is already easy to find online or in standard textbooks.
I am open to other suggestions.

Project milestones

Note: If you want to get started on your project before the course officially begins, that is fine with me.

Skim through course material, look around online, and discuss with me.
Provide three brief project proposals. Each should have a title and a brief description of the topic. These will be shared with the rest of the class.
After discussing with me, select your topic and describe what you plan on doing in more detail.
Provide a website with an outline of your project. If you are doing an interactive demo, you need to show that you are able to process user input.
Create a reasonable draft of your project. I always have a lot of comments and require revisions.

How do you pick a project?

Browse the course contents. There are several suggestions listed. Also if you find a topic interesting, a simple web search will often reveal extensions and recent research.
Look at old projects and ask me if they can be extended (or in some cases, redone).
Scan through conference and journal proceedings: Find some research paper that looks interesting.

Conference and journal proceedings

Note that selecting a paper from a prestigious conference will be impressive but you might also get stuck on details and have to dig much deeper to understand what is being described. Chances are that it will not be self-contained. The smaller conferences contain many papers with interesting results that are non-trivial while still at a level that is accessible to students. They often also have suggestions for further research.
You may need to access some of the following via your university portal.

Conferences

There is a wiki list of CS conferences. A few are highlighted below.
SODA (Symposium on Discrete Algorithms) [very prestigious, high level]
ESA (European Symposium on Algorithms) [a notch below SODA]
GD (International Symposium on Graph Drawing)
ISAAC (International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation)
WADS (Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium) [formerly Workshop on Data Structures]
SWAT (Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory)
LATIN (Latin American Theoretical INformatics)
SoCG (Symposium on Computational Geometry) [very prestigious, top level for the field]
CCCG (Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry) [an international conference, good for projects. Open access]
EuroCG (European Conference on Computational Geometry) [an international conference, good for projects]
FWCG (Fall Workshop on Computational Geometry) [U.S.-based. 2-page results, the most informal of this list]

Journals

JACM (Journal of the ACM)
SICOMP (SIAM Journal on Computing)
Algorithmica
IPL (Information Processing Letters) [relatively short results]
DCG (Discrete & Computational Geometry) [top level for the field]
JoCG (Journal of Computational Geometry) [relatively new journal, meant to be SoCG level, open access]
CGTA (Computational Geometry: Theory & Applications) [good papers, but not necessarily DCG level]
IJCGA (International Journal on Computational Geometry and Applications)