Projects will be evaluated on the standard department rubric containing:
The project research paper should be a survey of your topic, a summary of the state of the art survey of the topic area. This is essentially REAL research and I expect that an 'A' paper should be publishable as undergraduate research. You can start by reading a good survey paper. A couple of examples given as BibTeX:
@article{ heymann2007fss,
title={{Fighting Spam on Social Web Sites: A Survey of Approaches and Future Challenges}},
author={Heymann, P. and Koutrika, G. and Garcia-Molina, H.},
journal={IEEE Internet Computing},
volume={11},
number={6},
pages={36--45},
year={2007} }@article{ 1216373,
author = {Peng,, Tao and Leckie,, Christopher and Ramamohanarao,, Kotagiri},
title = {Survey of network-based defense mechanisms countering the DoS and DDoS problems},
journal = {ACM Comput. Surv.},
volume = {39},
number = {1},
year = {2007},
issn = {0360-0300},
pages = {3},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1216370.1216373},
publisher = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA} }
Make sure you can find this article through our libraries IEEE (or ACM) database link. I don't recommend searching on IEEE or ACM directly. Instead use scholar.google.com or CiteSeer.IST. Both of these provide excellent research capabilities and cross reference citations by or in the articles. You should always look up citations. If an article is cited frequently, it is probably an important resource to include. With a little searching on your part you'll see that this kind of information is easy to find on these sites. Of course you will find the BibTeX entry for papers on these sites as well. CiteSeer usually has a "version" of the paper in pdf available from a direct link.
Make sure to look at several survey papers. I expect your research component of the project to look much like a normal survey paper.
Well, asside from researching your topic in preparation for your project (research should be done first) you need to give information about your program. This can and should be a seperate paper and in reality is the documentation to your programming project. HOWEVER if you are primarily doing a programming intensive project (e.g. you are writing a spam filter using the techniques you've researched) you may choose to include your survey as an introduction to your project and write a project paper. IF YOU ARE DOING RESEARCH as the primary part of your project, than you should make your documentation more of a how-to document. Either way there should be a clearly defined programming component.
The spam example I gave would be a programming intensive project. A not so programming intensive project may include vulnerability scanning and patch management research coupled with examples of automation scripts to scan and patch systems and applications.
Essentially you will do one type of project or the other. There is no such thing as a ballanced programming/research project. One or the other must dominate or you will end up with mediocre research and mediocre program(s). Example of the grading rubrics are given here. Please direct question to me via email.