CLASS PRESENTATION/PROJECT IDEAS
You may propose a topic not on the provided list below. The list is provided only as an aid in choosing a topic of interest. 

PROPOSAL AND PROJECT ASSIGNMENT OVERVIEW

Your proposal is due on Wednesday, 11/08/23 by 6:30PM (central time zone). Your proposal should strictly follow the IEEE style guidelines for a conference paper and you should submit your proposal as a PDF file via email. The date and time stamp of the email that you send to me, with the proposal file as an attachment, will be used as your official submission time and date. Please email the PDF file only to mitch@smu.edu.

Your proposal should include relevant references in the reference section. You should do a literature search to find out what has been done in the area you are proposing and you should discuss how your proposed research will differ from past efforts. This means that you should carefully read your references and consider how they apply to your project proposal. References that are irrelevant to your proposal will cause you to lose points. You must use the IEEE standard conference paper format to write your proposal. Be sure to strictly follow these formats and do not change spacings, font sizes, etc. Your proposal should be a MINIMUM of 3 pages in length, but will likely be longer (discounting space for figures) and you should thoroughly explain: (1) the problem or topic you are researching and why it is important; (2) how you plan to conduct your analysis, experiements, or theoretical studies, and (3) the outcomes you expect to happen. Figures (drawn yourself - NOT COPIED) and tables are helpful. Plagiarism in any form will result in a grade of ZERO. DO NOT COPY anything from any source - this includes figures and equations. IEEE conference paper format can be found here: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html

An important aspect of this proposal is to give me a chance to OK your final class project. If I find your project to be unsuitable for any of a variety of reasons, including those described below, you will have to rewrite your proposal. So do a goo job the first time!

Your proposal will use the format of a typical research conference paper, but it will not include all sections and information since it is a proposal and not a completed project. If you write the proposal correctly, you will be able to reuse much of the text when you write and submit your final project paper at the end of the semester. First, I will describe the format of a typical research paper that will serve as a guide for your final project report, then I will describe how your proposal will differ.

A typical research conference paper has the following major sections, shown below with generic section headings. Your section headings should be more specific and appropriate to your project.

TYPICAL RESEARCH CONFERENCE PAPER OUTLINE/SECTIONS

Title: The title should be short and concise. It is not a sentence. Avoid the use of colons and semi-colons. Short and succinct titles are more impactful as a general rule.

Author Block: The author block should contain your full name, your institution, and your email address.

Abstract: No more than a single paragraph and between 150 to 350 words in length. An abstract should be a short summary of the entire paper and it should not read as if it were an introduction. As with all sections in your paper, you should use present-tense verbs - avoid the temptation to use past or future tense verbs. The only time future tense is approproiate is in text describing future or follow-on efforts, typically in the summary portion of a paper. Although this is the first section of text in the paper, it should actually be the last section that you write. If you try to write this part first, you will most likely find that you have really written text that is more suitable for the Introduction than as an Abstract.

Introduction: This is typically a 3 to 10 paragraph section that is no longer than 2 pages, with typical introduction sections averaging around a single page. The introduction section briefly describes the overall problem you are considering and why it is important to the reader. You may need to describe how your problem fits into a larger framework if it is very detailed and only represents a sub-problem or issue as part of a larger area of interest. This is also the portion of the paper where you describe approaches taken by other researchers, the advantages and disadvantages of these past results, and most importantly, how your approach differs from past work. This is a section where many of your citations are given since you are referring to past important work. This section should also address your motivation for your particular approach; that is, why do you think your approach may yield improved results compared to other past techniques. Examples of motivations could include enhanced accuracy, improved efficiency, or many other attributes.

Background: This section may have one or more subsections. It is meant to provide brief summaries of important background topics that the reader should be familiar with in order to read and understand the rest of the paper. For example, if your approach uses a particular area of mathematics that is not widely used in the community reading your paper, a brief background of important topics may be important here. Other examples are the use of special types of data structures or, if you plan to use a result from another field but apply it to your problem, you may provide a summary of the method here. Antoher common, though not required, subsection is an introduction of the mathematical notation that you will be using. Since the background section will most likely reference other past work, this is also a paper section where citations to important references are often found.

Approach: This is the section of the paper where you describe the approach of your method, or the design of your device/system. This is where you describe the novelty of your work that makes it worthy of publication. This should be described in a succinct and compact manner while also ffering enough detail such that the results could be easily recreated by another reader with the appropriate background. It is sometimes the case that references to similar approaches are given with an accompanying description of how your approach differs. This section should NOT describe how well your approach performs (or does not perform), that will come in a later section. It is common to include formal mathematical definitions in the background section if they are definitions that are already known.

Results:This is the section where you describe the results of the evaluation of your approach. There are a variety of acceptable ways to describe the results of your approach. If your approach is theoretical or mathematically provable, you can state and prove lemmas, theorems and corollaries. If your approach involves heuratic methods, you should implement a prototype and exercise it to obtain experiemental results. Experiemental results can be given as graphs, tables of data, or other visuals. Yet another way to describe results is through a case study, although this form of results is typically only useful for approaches involving the design of complex systems. Many times, a combination of these types of results are presented. A challenge is to include enough results to indicate that a thorough evaluation of your approach was undertaken without inundating the reader with too many results. No one is going to plow through a table of data that is large. It is somewhat of an art to present results in a compact manner while also including enough to show a thorough evaluation. Large tables of data or large numbers of graphs are bad form and will detract from your score. Another very important part of this section, which should come first, is a description of your experiemnts, how they were chosen, what they are intended to show, and how they were conducted. Remeber that the purpose of a research paper is to provide enough information that your results can be recreated - this hlds for the Results section as well as the Approach section.

Summary: This section is typically one to 3 paragraphs in length. It is a brief summary of the entire paper including the motivation, approach, and results, with an emphasis on the overall outcome and evaluation of your work. Remeber to write this ection in present-tense as it feels more natural to use past tense here since your are describing what you have already accomplished. Typically a research project will lead to further areas of related investigation. For this reason, the last paragraph is often devoted to "Future Work" or follow-on work. This should not be confused with a paragraph that describes what needs to be accomplished for an incomplete project. If you write about tasks that should be carried out regarding the subject of your paper, it means you have not completed your task and you should not yet be trying to write-up your project. However, most projects do lead the researcher to discover new extensions or related efforts to the work described in the paper and it is appropriate to describe these topics in this paragraph.

References: This is the list of bibliographies or references to the citations in your paper. It should NOT contain refernces that have not been cited in the body of the paper, only those that are cited within the body of the paper are appropriate. Each should have enough information such that it can be easily found by another researcher. The majority of these references should be from the published literature and not just a bunch of website URLs. For this class project, I am going to insist that at least five of your references be from the literature that you can easily find using tools like IEEEXplore. I do not want to see a reference section that is comprised of a bunch of webpages found through a Google search. These should be properly formatted in accordance with IEEE guidelines and not have missing details. Author names should be correctly spelled. References should be directly relevant to your paper subjct. If they are only tangentially relevant and it is clear they do not directly contribute to your project, you will lose points.

GUIDELINES FOR THE PROPOSAL

A proper proposal is a lot of work because it means that you have spent time reviewing the literature, finding the relavant papers to your project, and formulating an idea. It is often the case that you will find that some other researcher has already expored your idea. Do not be discouraged, read these papers carefully and you will often find that you can refine your idea and approach such that a better project will result. Many of the above sections for a complete research conference paper are appropriate for your proposal. While I expect that you will be able to reuse much of a properly written proposal in your final project, it would be very surprisinging if you could reuse it all verbatim. Once you engage in your project, you will undoubtedly find that what you planned to do differs from what you actually did. You will likely think of improved ways to or approaches to solve your problem or even a variation of your planned problem. The same is true for your expriements and other sections. Nevertheless, your proposal should contains the following sections:

Title: same as above

Abstract: same as above except that you will need to describe your "expected" results since you will not have actually performed expriements or implemented prototypes yet.

Introduction: same as above

Approach: Very similar to above with the exception that you will describe your "planned" approach rather than the actual approach since this is a proposal. It is also the case that the level of detail may not be as fine-grained as it will be in your final report. You should also include a section on the resources you plan to use since it is important to think about "how" you will carry out your project. For example, will you need the use of the HPC, certain software, the IBM quantum machines, or others. It will not be acceptable for you to turn in a final project that is incomplete with an excuse that, "I could not obtain access to ?????, thus I could not complete my experiement." A successful proposal is one where the researcher has carefully considered all the resources they will need, how they will obtain the resources, and how the resources will be used.

Results: While you will obviously not have the results of your project yet in the porposal, you should describe the type of results you plan to provide. This includes a description of your experiments as you envision them, how they will be carried out, the amount of time and resources you will need to conduct them, etc. Additionally, strong proposals often have some preliminary results that convince the proposal reviewer that the proposed project has a strong likelihood of producing good results. This does not mean that you should actually perform the project work first, but you could, for example, give results from quick high-level simulations or calculations that foster confidence in your proposal.

Summary: Here you will summarize your proposal rather than your finished project.

References: same as above. I would expect the final report to have a few additional references in addition to those in the proposal, but you should include most of the primary references in the porposal section to convince me that you have properly considered the past work and that you are confident that you are not "re-inventing the wheel," or repeating past work.

IMPORTANT DETAILS FOR YOUR PROPOSAL AND YOUR FINAL REPORT

Spelling and grammar are very important and will count as part of your grade.

Strict adherence to proper IEEE formatting guidelines are required.

References must be properly cited

Plagiarism will result in a grade of zero. Plagiarism is the copying of other peoples' ideas, content, figures, etc. without proper citation and/or presenting them as your own. It is improper to copy text from another paper and cite it - this is still plagiarism. You may NOT copy and paste bitmaps or other formats of figures from another source - you MUST create your own figures manually. You may NOT re-create someone else's figure exactly to avoid plagiarism - this is still a violation.

This is NOT a group assignment. I expect everyone to do their own work individually.

Make sure your PDF file is readable. Email it to yourself first and then open it from the email to ensure it is not corrupted. I will not accept Word or other files, I want PDF only as a single file.

Especially for the final project, do not put large tables of data or multiple figures - one of the things I would like for you to learn is to provide a succinct, but complete, set of data to support your results and your approach.

Some Suggested Topics:

Write a significant program on the IBM or Rigetti machine and/or simulator. Must have instructor OK of the program and you must describe the specific program, how you will analyze the results, test data, etc. Many common quantum algorithms are online. I want to see some novelty if you decide to implement an algorithm. Implementing Shor's method for factoring is an example of what I would NOT find to be acceptable.

Detailed analysis, simulation, and theory of physical implementations. For example, a paper detailing how superconducting semicondustor qubit circuits would be OK if it is done in sufficient detail. If I suspect the material was copied without your deep understanding, I may choose to conduct an oral exam with you to satisfy that you truly understood everything.

Recent andvances in quantum cryptography, in particular either quantum resistant convention codes or new quantum-enabled codes. If you study quantum resistant codes, you must provide a detailed analysis showing or proving their resistance. I would expect that you implement some prototypes and conduct experiments.

Survey and tutorial in alternative quantum computing paradigms including an analysis of a how basic quantum informatic operations are accomplished (anyon/topological, one-way/cluster-state, or others)

New approaches for quantum algorithm/circuit automated synthesis. This could be for qubits or qudits (higher-dimensioal Hilbert spaces).

New approaches for validating or verifying the functional correctness of quantum algorithms.

New approaches for enhancing quantum computing reliability. Adding mechanisms to allow for correct execution in the presence of faults or decoherence.

Implementation of Grover's algorithm to solve a particular (unsoovled) problem and demonstrate that it is functional using the IBM or Rigetti simulators.

Special attention should be given to the design and implementaiton of the oracle function.Development of a new synthesis method for quantum or reversible logic circuits.

Implement and demonstrate various forms of logical qubits and experiement with their robustness through the application of appropriate fault models.

Implement an optimization problem using QAOA, VQE, or other approach. You should pick a particular optimization problem that has not yet been tackled in the literature and implement a prototype.