Due Date: March 7 by 11:59 pm ET
First Milestone Report Submission: Submit your first milestone report as a PDF on Gradescope, ensuring the person submitting tags all other team members. Include a link to your code in a GitHub repository.
The first milestone report serves as an initial checkpoint to assess early progress. It focuses on defining research objectives, understanding the dataset, and performing preliminary analysis to guide further investigation. You are required to use either the LaTeX or the MS Word templates provided here.
Format
The first milestone report should not exceed 2 pages, formatted according to the required template, excluding references. This 2-page limit includes all content, such as the main text, figures, and tables, to ensure consistent length across different teams. It should include:
- Title, Authors
- Introduction: Introduce your project, emphasizing its importance or why it’s interesting. Highlight key questions and expected insights.
- Code: Provide a GitHub URL for your code. There’s no need to submit the full dataset, but you may include a few representative samples if relevant.
- Dataset Description: Describe the dataset, including its source, structure, and preprocessing steps taken so far. Discuss any challenges encountered in handling the data.
- Exploratory Analysis: Summarize early data exploration efforts. Include visualizations and preliminary findings on network structures, node connectivity, and statistical insights.
- Narrative and Insights: Outline the narrative you’re building based on your analysis. Describe emerging patterns and how they relate to the overall goal of understanding brain connectivity.
- Timeline and Next Steps: Present a structured plan for the upcoming work, focusing on refining analysis methods and selecting modeling approaches.
- Contributions: Detail each team member’s contributions.
Expected Outcomes
- Cleaned and preprocessed functional MRI dataset
- Basic visualizations of network structures
- Early hypotheses and areas for more thorough investigation
- Well-commented code repository
- A structured work plan for the next phase
Grading: The milestone is primarily a way to receive feedback from the Instructor to ensure you’re making reasonable progress. As long as your milestone follows the instructions, clearly articulates the narrative you’re building, and demonstrates thoughtful exploration of your data, you should do well. Please be sure to address any assumptions or challenges that could impact the completion of your project.
