UKRI CDT in Biomedical AI
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Group Project & Individual Project Guidelines

Information about the course objectives, learning and teaching activities and assessment.

The first-year projects are an essential component of the CDT programme. The Group Project (GP) and Individual Project (IP) are intended to be substantial pieces of independent research to be carried out under supervision of academic staff. Projects must have at least two supervisors, one from AI or machine learning, and one from biomedical sciences. The role of supervisors is to give technical advice and assist you in planning the research. Students should expect approximately weekly meetings with their supervisors. In the case of GPs, supervisors are expected to designate a peer mentor who will provide hands-on supervision for the whole team.

Choosing Projects

There will be two calls for supervisors to submit GP and IP proposals. After the projects are made available to the cohort, you should identify projects that interest you and arrange meetings with the supervisors. These meetings are the main opportunity for you to get to know more details on the project and supervision arrangements. Keep in mind that the GP and IP, or variants of them, may extend into your full PhD project.

The GPs will be carried out in groups of 2-3 students. We expect groups to self-assemble, thus it is important that you engage with fellow students to make sure that groups are well balanced in skills and interests.

Once you have identified a project and supervisor who is willing to take you on, you will need to communicate this to CDT management. In case several groups or students wish to take the same project, the ideal is that you reach an agreement among students and supervisors. However, the course organiser will be happy to assist in reaching an agreement.

Timeline

2023/24 timeline

  • 18 October 2023: group project proposals are published
  • 24 November 2023: group projects selection deadline
  • 08 January 2024: start of GP
  • 27 January 2024: individual project proposals are published (to be confirmed)
  • 17 February 2024: IP selection deadline (to be confirmed)
  • 05 April 2024 at 12 pm: submission of GP report
  • 18 August 2024, noon: submission of IP report (to be confirmed)

Relationship to your PhD Project

Both projects are designed to prepare you for the extended work that you will do in your PhD. They are intended to be novel research and we hope that in some cases the GP and IP will lead to publishable results (although this is not a formal requirement).

It is possible that the projects lead into larger PhD projects, should you decide to continue research in the area. However, it is not required that your PhD research be in the same area as your IP or GP. Some students will indeed continue their PhD work with the same research area, and others will choose a different PhD project. Both of these outcomes are perfectly fine. If you do already have a good idea about your intended PhD topic, you will want to take this into account when selecting your GP and IP — whether it be to choose a topic in the same area, or to choose a topic that will broaden your skillset.

Progress and Q&A Sessions

We strongly encourage you to discuss your projects with other students, talk informally about your progress, and get advice from your peers about any issues. The course organiser will also arrange dedicated Q&A sessions to discuss issues with the whole cohort.

Dissertation

Projects are assessed based on written reports only. In addition, the GP contains a formative oral presentation where all groups will present their projects in front of supervisors. GP presentation session will take place a couple of days before the report submission deadline to give you the opportunity to refine the dissertation with the feedback you receive.

Dissertations will typically follow the following format:

  • Title page, including an abstract.
  • Introduction: an introduction to the document, clearly stating the hypothesis or objective of the project, motivation for the work and the results achieved. The structure of the remainder of the document should also be outlined.
  • Background: background to the project, previous work, exposition of relevant literature, setting of the work in the proper context. This should contain sufficient information to allow the reader to appreciate the contribution you have made.
  • Description of the work undertaken: this may be divided into chapters describing the conceptual design work and the actual implementation separately. Any problems or difficulties and the suggested solutions should be mentioned. Alternative solutions and their evaluation should also be included.
  • Analysis or Evaluation: results and their critical analysis should be reported, whether the results conform to expectations or otherwise and how they compare with other related work. Where appropriate evaluation of the work against the original objectives should be presented.
  • Conclusion: concluding remarks and observations, unsolved problems, suggestions for further work.
  • Bibliography.

The length of the GP report should be 15-25 pages in total and cannot exceed 25 content pages. The length of the IP dissertation should be 30-50 pages in total and cannot exceed 50 content pages. Front matter, bibliography, and appendices do not count as content pages. Appendices can include e.g. code, experimental data, formal proofs, etc. But bear in mind that markers will not be required to read material in appendices, so both reports should be understandable without reference to them. Your thesis will be evaluated on its quality, not its length.

In addition, reports and dissertations must be accompanied by a statement declaring that the student has read and understood the University's plagiarism guidelines. Note that you are required to submit a single GP report for the whole team. The GP report must include a statement of the contributions of each team member.

Dissertations must be typeset in LaTeX ideally using the InfThesis style. You don't have to use these packages, but your thesis must match the style (i.e., font size, text width, etc).

Submission

Students must submit their project by the deadlines mentioned above. Submission must be made via the relevant course pages on LEARN.

Software. When you submit the electronic copy of your thesis you will also be asked to provide an archive file (tar or zip) containing all the project materials. Students are required to submit a zip file with source code, object and make files, together with any associated data that has been accumulated. Please follow the accepted practice of creating a README file which documents your files and their function. Further details of the submission will be made available in LEARN. See these instructions for how to submit your dissertation electronically.

Dissertation Assessment

GP Dissertations are assessed by one of the supervisors and another independent member of staff. Marks will be averaged if they differ by <10% and moderated by the Exec board otherwise. IP dissertation are assessed by two members of staff, none of which can be part of the supervisory team. Dissertations are assessed according to the University of Edinburgh Extended Common Marking Scheme for Postgraduate Assessment (CMS4), a more detailed interpretation of these prepared by the School of Informatics is provided here. The key criteria are:

Basic Criteria

    • Understanding of the problem
    • Completion of the work
    • Quality of the work
    • Quality of the dissertation

Additional Criteria

    • Knowledge of the literature
    • Critical evaluation of previous work
    • Critical evaluation of own work
    • Justification of design decisions
    • Solution of conceptual problems
    • Amount of work

Exceptional Criteria

    • Evidence of outstanding merit e.g. originality
    • Inclusion of material worthy of publication

The marking guidelines can be found here.

See also:

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