Write a page or two for your project proposal:
- What is the goal of the project?
- What parts (if any) of it exist now, and what parts need to be done to reach the goal? What is your back-up plan if any of these parts are at risk?
- Who will do which parts? (if a group project).
- Make it obvious what it has to do with Affective Computing. For example, you can use machine learning to learn about affect, and perhaps classify it, but the emphasis in this class should be not on a machine learning algorithm but instead on the way you are handling the affective data and its quirks / special nature. Similarly for human-computer interaction or education related projects, be sure to emphasize the affect-related issues.
- Are you involving human subjects? Have you got COUHES approval or have you gotten your advisor to add you to an approved protocol, etc.? Often an existing protocol can be slightly modified, and this is fast. Or are you exempt? If in doubt, go to COUHES and ask.
- Future (after the project is done): Visualize the big win—that you learn something you can teach the rest of us. It doesn’t have to be a big insight (although that’s awesome if it is) but it does have to be “done” in the sense that you have to get some answers. Did you build something and it does NOT work? That’s OK, let’s hear what you tried and why you think it didn’t work. If it does work, how do you know it works and when do you think it would break? What do you know now that you didn’t? You can’t answer this at this early stage of project planning (unless you’re cheating, but be a better person than that!). Let’s work together to design a project that will get some answers, so we can all learn from it.
