Introduction

My main areas of interest are embedded systems, real-time, networking and formal methods.

The key requirement for doing a project with me is that you should be committed to developing a piece of software. If you're trying to avoid programming as much as possible, you should probably talk to someone else.

The next section gives a list of particular topics that I have in mind for this year. Any one of them could form the basis of an interesting project. If one or more of these topics grabs your interest, do some googling to get a rough idea of what might be involved and then speak to me to develop your ideas further. If you don't like any of these ideas but you think you'd like to do something in a related area, speak to me about it.

Project ideas 2010-2011

• Comparison of FreeRTOS and MicroC/OS-II for embedded systems
• Adding support for FAT filesystem to embedded OS
• Interfacing GPS module to embedded system development board
• Controller Area Network (CAN) driver and high-level API
• Investigation of MILCAN
• 802.15.4 to CAN gateway
• Implementation and performance analysis of 6LoWPAN
• Accelerometer performance analysis and example application
• How tight are the 'tight execution time bounds' claimed by some WCET analysers?
• Model checking of network comms for security properties
• Automatic generation of ACLs from security properties

Writing your dissertation

Content and Presentation

Some of your content will be based on your literature review. This will involve reading some literature. Unless you have a plan, your reading will be inefficient. How to read a research paper is an excellent guide to forming a plan for reading a paper. Follow its advice.

There are several sites with links to a variety of advice about how to write clearly about your ideas. Not all of the advice is directly relevant to writing a B.Sc. or M.Sc. dissertation in Computing or Engineering. The advice may not even be consistent. However, it is well worth reading, as you begin to form your own ideas about how to write a good dissertation. The sites that I find most useful are:

• William Stallings How-To
• Carnegie Mellon: Advice on Research and Writing
• Writing technical articles

However, before rushing to devour all of the hints and tips available from these pages, you should remember that the most valuable document for you is the project handbook for the module that you are studying. You should pay particular attention to the marking guidelines and ensure that, for each part of your dissertation, you have addressed all of the requirements of the marking scheme. And when the project handbook requires an approach that differs from that suggested by some other document, it is the project handbook that you should follow. All of the general writing guidelines in the world are of little benefit if you do not adhere strictly to the specific requirements of the organization to which you intend to submit your document.

Once you're clear about the advice in your project handbook, you may find the following helpful for parts of your dissertation. Remember that much of the advice below is written for academics intending to submit a journal or conference paper. You'll need to interpret it carefully to make it fit the requirements of a dissertation.

Abstract

• How to write an abstract: excellent advice from Philip Koopman.
• How to have your abstract rejected: may not be directly relevant to you but it still makes me laugh.

Main report body

• How to organize your thesis: intended mainly for Ph.D. dissertations - but if you disregard the references to the need to demonstrate an original contribution to knowledge, this works for M.Sc. and B.Sc. dissertations too.
• How to write a great research paper: you can guess this is advice about writing a paper, not a dissertation - but if you ignore the advice about length of each section, almost everything else applies to writing a dissertation as well.

Bibliography, references, citations

• Cite them right: essential reading.

Style

• Guardian style guide: I like the Guardian's style. It's a good guide to modern British English.

Tools

It's hard to imagine why anyone would write a Computing or Engineering project dissertation using anything other than LaTeX. Its key benefit is that it allows you to concentrate on the content of your writing rather than its layout. Also, it handles automatically the production of lists of contents, tables and figures, and, using BibTeX, it makes it easy to produce a bibliography and to manage citations. It also enables you to construct more beautiful documents.

I've made available some resources that show you how to use this tool to produce a dissertation. The Not so short introduction to LaTeX should be used to answer your general LaTeX queries. There's also a useful LaTeX Wikibook that is worth a look.