Open Day: Info for UCC Students and Staff

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TL;DR - The Gist

The Open Day will take place on April 1.

Each student will present their project by the following three parts:

  1. A written abstract. This text will appear online as well as in the the printed booklet.
  2. A short video. Not longer than 5 minutes.
  3. The live demonstrations at the dedicated lab desk.

Please find further technical information on each of these parts below. There might be additional instructions issued by the administrators of the academic degree programs.


Timeline

Phase 1 - Preparation and Testing

This phase starts as soon as you can read this page. Students can upload and view their videos and their abstracts. Please note:

  • To upload go to Open Day -> Setup Presentation. For technical details please read the detailed guide below.
  • To view go to Open Day -> View Presentation.
  • Uploaded content remains private throughout Phase 1. Only the uploader themselves and very few technical staff can view this and only for the purpose of testing! In fact, it will be of great help if there are as many and as early uploads as possible! I encourage all students to upload some sample abstract and video. Lorem ipsum type of content is perfectly suitable for both abstract and video.
  • The presentation can be modified any time throughout Phase 1. The abstracts can be edited online and the video be replaced by a newer version..

Phase 2 - March 25 - Content Freeze and Publication

We need to allow for some time to print and distribute the paper booklet and to let our guests browse your presentations. This means that:

  • Abstracts and videos cannot be modified further.
  • All abstracts and videos are made public. Interested parties (that includes students!) can browse the presentations and earmark those where they want to meet the student during the interactive sessions.

Phase 2 will begin on March 25.

Phase 3 - The Actual Open Day

The students will present their work at their allocated lab desks. There will be a morning session for examiners and other UCC academics and an afternoon session for everybody who has an invitation. It is our goal to create a lively and relaxed atmosphere.


Detailed Guide for Project Students

The Concept of the Open Day

Attendance is a mandatory part of your project module. However, the Open Day is not an examination, your presentation is not a marked deliverable and your performance will not be formally assessed.

Instead, the Open Day gives you a golden opportunity to impress those you speak to with the quality of your own work and that of your classmates. You owe it to yourself and to your fellow students to make an effort to create a favourable impression. You should also bear in mind that the Second Reader of your project will certainly use the opportunity to speak to you in considerable detail to get a sense of what you have accomplished.

Requirements

You must have a student account on https://project.cs.ucc.ie/ and it must be linked as the undertaking student to a project. The project must have a supervisor and a second reader, both of which must have lecturer accounts.

It is very important that your student number is correctly entered at My Account->Account Details. Otherwise, certain features will simply not work. Also, please make sure to select the checkbox of your degree program.

The Video

It is advisable to have some (possibly very sketchy) version of your video ready before you begin to write your abstract because the upload interface will reject incomplete presentations without video.

Furthermore:

  • The runtime should be approximately 5 minutes.
  • Please make sure that your video has the common 16:9 aspect ratio. This is usually the default for recording apps.
  • Videos must be uploaded to https://media.heanet.ie/ which is accessible to all UCC students (so I am told!). Other hosting services will be rejected.
  • The presentation upload interface will ask you for your video URL. To find this URL from https://media.heanet.ie/, go to My Media, click on your video file and then select Share->Public Link to Your Video.
  • Other heanet video URLs will be rejected (the appropriate frame embedding code will be generated automatically).
  • Your video must be publicly viewable. You can check this at the heanet video page by clicking on the Access control tab. Restrict viewing to... must be set to Public.
  • Tip 1: Recorded Powerpoint presentations are probably the easiest option but they can easily look fairly dull. A presentation video always looks much nicer when you can be seen whenever you talk. I recommend screen recording software such as OBS Studio or similar and including a webcam frame into your scene.
  • Tip 2: Use large sans fonts (between 4 and 8 lines should vertically fit on the screen). If possible have a visible pointer in the capture (laser dot, arrow etc).
  • Tip 3: Select a suitable thumbnail as preview frame for your video. You can do that on the heanet page under the Thumbnails tab. You can even upload your own still image there.
  • Tip 4: Verify that your video can play in HD resolution. The automatically chosen playback quality might be lower, depending on network conditions. But you should always be able to force 1080p by clicking on the gear icon in the embedded player. Heanet re-encodes uploaded videos. It might help to remux your video locally to MP4 and then re-upload.

The Abstract

The abstract should provide a crisp, succinct summary of the project. It should indicate clearly what the objective of the project was and sketch what was achieved. It should be accessible to as wide a readership as possible and should try to enthuse the reader to learn more about the project.

The abstract must be entered in Markdown syntax which is something you will grasp in less than 5 minutes (PDF, MS Office etc are not suitable for online presentations since these document formats are tied to hardcoded output media, e.g. a fixed paper geometry).

Please stick to the following rules:

  • Begin straight away with your first section of main content. Headers for author, project title, supervisor etc will be automatically generated wherever appropriate. Thus, do not repeat your project title in the textarea input, otherwise it would appear twice (especially in the printed booklet).

  • Do not use headlines because they would break the article layout in the printed booklet.

  • The abstract must have between 700 and 1200 characters (150-200 words). You may find these sample texts with given word count helpful as well as this word and character counter.

  • Please do not include images in your abstract.

  • Break down your abstract into multiple paragraphs. In Markdown, an empty line will start a new paragraph.

For those who are interested: this help text is also written in markdown and the same CSS will be applied to your content. We use the famous github markdown stylesheet with very few minor modifications.

Optional

I encourage you to update your personal introduction on FDAT (My Account->Personal Introduction). That's also done in Markdown and it will be linked to your presentation.


Guide for Examiners and Other UCC Attendees

Not much at this stage. As written above, the web interface for browsing presentations will be open in Phase 2. There are filter options which help you to find the projects you are supervising and those where you are second reader.

If you want to earmark any other project you are interested in then use the star (bookmark) option which is also available outside the Open Day pages (from the single project views).