mw4 projects

8/13/2019 Mw4 Projects

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How to write research projects

Emanuele [email protected]

http://retis.sssup.it/~giorgio/h2d.html

Why should you care writing projects?

new researchi

There are 3 main reasons for writing research projects:

Improve thesociety

2

i

research

moneypeople

equipment

travels

consumables

Other reasons

Evaluation of research include several parameters:

number & quality of publications;

number of citations ( h index);

number of projects;

number of industrial contracts;

amount of money brought to the university.

Making industrial contacts that can be useful for

additional research collaborations;

finding a job for yourself and other colleagues.

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Before writing a project

Identify an objective.

Identify an appropriate call for proposals.

Carefully read the call looking for topics.

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Adapt your objectives with the objectives of the call.

Find research partners having the required expertise.

Find industrial partners that can provide a case studyand exploit the results.

Structure of a project

IdeaIdea

ConsortiumConsortium

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ImplementationImplementation

ImpactImpact

BudgetBudget

The idea

Which is the key idea of the project? How we can synthesize the idea in few sentences?

Which is the context of the project idea? Summarize the idea in the Vision

The idea of the project is not enough, we need to transform

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Objectives the achievement of the project in terms of

research and technology Measures of the Objectives how the above achievements can

be measured Key element

Objectives should be ambitious but realistic Better less objectives than many unconnected

Summarize your idea with a diagram


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FP7 EUCLIPSE ProjectEuropean Union Cloud Intercomparison, Process Study & Evaluation Project

7http://www.euclipse.eu/projectinfo.html

Example Project CLOUDY

We start defining a title and acronym for the didactic project

Software Methodologies for Embedded

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Ideas in CLOUDY

Vision In a world of strong interconnection make simpler for

embedded device to get resources for computing like storage, computer vision, speech recognition

Objectives

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Objective 2 Software Framework for Interoperability Objective 4 Provide a tool chain for integrating the services

Objective 5 Test bed on Portable Computer Vision Objective 6 Test bed for Robotics

Not all the objectives are foundational, some are practical results

Consortium

Which are the competences needed for reaching the objectives? Typically a mixture of

Basic Research Technology Development Companies for Exploitation

The Team is a ke element for the feasibilit of the ro ect and its

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excellence a premise for obtaining new results

Properties of a good consortium Excellence in each specific domain Complementarity of competencies Partner selected because it provides a specific enabling technology for

the task (e.g. technology or methodology) Which is the coverage of required competencies across the

consortium?

Project Design Workflow

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VisionVision ObjectivesObjectives CompetencesCompetences ConsortiumConsortium

Refinement of plan

Consortium in CLOUDY

What we need for this Project? We need experts from different domains

Embedded Systems Networked Systems

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o o cs Cloud Management

Which kind of companies do we need for the project? Small Companies vs Large Companies

Who is going to implement what? Which technology is each partner providing?


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FP7 Robohow Approach

Robohow is a FP7 ICT Project for making robot learn

recipes from the Web and execute them

13http://robohow.eu

FP7 Robohow Consortium

Consortium is made of 9 partners 8 Universities in 7 States 1 Company

Coordinator does key research in Cognitive Robotics One artners rovides Architecture and Evaluation

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Another looks at Learning from Human being its field

of expertise Two partners provide Visual Perception The industrial partners will look at the application of

the results on a new robotic platform That platform is not the one of the evaluation

State of the Art

State of the Art is more important than for writing a paper

State of the Art for a project focuses to most recent findings and at larger scale than a paper

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project can cover?

What makes part of State of the Art? Publications Other Projects in the domain (EU and non EU)

And possible synergies Consortium Experience

State of the Art of Consortium

The experience of the Consortium, or the Principal Investigator, is part of the State of the Art

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show to the the Reviewers

1. The understanding of the challenges2. Feasibility of tackling a new problem

Beyond State of the Art

A key point of the project proposal is to highlight how it goes beyond the State of the Art

This the reason why the project should be funded!

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In some calls not just an improvement but a breakthrough is required Be careful anyway on your statement because they

should be measurable We have to see clearly identify how to measure

these advancements

Preliminary Data

In some grants like Medical ones you are requested to provide a Preliminary Data section

This is a critical analysis of information available in the Consortium that is a fundamental basis for the research proposed in the project

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some of the challenges and know how to face new problems

It is also used as a way for the reviewer to understand the capacity of the principal investigator of understanding methods and technologies

Unpublished data can be used for supporting the key idea


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Methodology and Workplan

Provided ideas and objectives, how the work is organized along the duration of the project? How the different action lines of the project interact

each other toward the common goals? Example of phases

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1. Data acquisition2. Prototype3. Testing4. Evaluation

Phases depends on the type of research: Multiple prototypes Parallel activities

VCycle

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Example of Workplan from FP7 EU SAPHARI

FP7 SAPHARI on Safety in Robotics

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The strategy of SAPHARI is to address safe physical human robot interactionfollowing both a bottom-up and a top-down approach.

http://www.saphari.eu/

CLOUDY Methodology

The proposed methodology is use case driven1. Select the use cases2. Find common elements across use cases3. Ada t the ro osed eneral methodolo to use

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cases4. Create the infrastructure5. Test the use cases

Which are the limitations of this approach for technology driven projects?

Work packages and Tasks

Projects are typically organized in Work Packages A work package in Project Management is a

group of related tasks that are defined at the same level within a work breakdown structure

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Each Work package should have Description of activities in brief Subset of the Project Objectives Timing as Start/End and Effort

How work packages are connected?

Task

Task as a piece of contiguous work that is delimited in time and amount of effort

Typically tasks are short lived and terminated

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Tasks have dependencies In some notations Tasks are macro tasks inside

Work packages and the last for longer periods of time


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FP7 Robohow Work packages

Each Work package is associated to one or more objectivesWP1 RepresentationWP2 Observation of Human DemonstrationWP3 Constraint and O timization based Control

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WP4 Perception for Robot Action and ManipulationWP5 Learning from Interaction with HumanWP6 Plan based ControlWP7 System Integration and BenchmarkingWP8 Dissemination and OutreachWP9 Project Coordination and Management

Example of Workplan from FP7 EU ACTIVE

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FP7 EU Active Constraints Technologies for Ill-defined o r Volatile Environments

http://www.active-fp7.eu/

FP7 Adiamantium Relationships

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Work packages in CLOUDY

Examples of Work packages WP1 Design and Models WP2 Resource Abstraction and Management WP3 OS support for cloud resources

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WP4 Tool chain development WP5 Use cases

Can you identify objectives of each work packages?Which other Work package organizations are possible?

Progress Measurements

Why? To motivate the team

To get access to the next year of funding To ease takin decisions in the next hases of research

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How we can measure the progress of our projectand achievement of the objectives?

Two concepts are typical: Deliverable

Milestone

Progress Measurements (cont)

More specifically for technological projects:1. Specification of software or hardware2. Definition of Metrics

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3. New functionalities for systems4. Benchmarking of developed systems5. Results of Evaluations


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Deliverables

Deliverable is a concrete result of the project that is made

accessible to

the

reviewers

of

the

project

or

the

the

broader public

Different forms of Deliverables: Report best if containing published papers

But publishing timing doesnt fit well with project timing

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Open Source code or Datasets

Best practice is to provide a Deliverable every time a Task ends Align timing of Task ends if possible

Key deliverables in technology projects are1. Specifications2. Prototypes of result3. Reports on Evaluations

FP7 Adamantium Deliverables

Examples of deliverables: Design and Development of the MCMS Action Engine Module (P)

Definition and specifications of IPTV and VoIP Services (R)

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Development of the MCMS monitoring and adaptation modules (P)

Voice and Video Quality Perceptual Models (R) Real Time Dynamic content adaptation mechanisms

(P) Trials and evaluation(R) Final report (R)

CLOUDY Deliverables

Domain specific Requirements (R) Application Structure (R) Resource Classification (R) Analysis of application performance Service adaptation Optimal resource allocation Reservation under Linux P

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Monitoring and Supervisor Linux Deployment on Platforms Device Support Programming customization Runtime Support Global Performance Analysis Application Tuning (P) Driving simulator (P) Virtual environments (P) Project Website (O)

Mixture of Reports (R) andPrototypes (P)

Milestones

A Milestone is a key moment of the project in which a measurable and fundamental result is obtained

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point for taking decisions about the progress Control points where decisions are needed with

regard to the next stage of the project

Multiple Tasks converge to a single Milestones

FP7 EUCLIPSE Milestones

Example of Milestones (over 48 months): Completion of COSP and MODIS software and

CALIPSOPARASOL observational products (M3)

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hypotheses relating to cloud climate feedbacks (M30)

Metrics for clouds, precipitation and radiation developed and applied to ESMs and NWP (M36)

CLOUDY Milestones

Example of Milestones for CLOUDY: Specification Design (M6) Performance Analysis and Tools (M12)

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Tool chain (M24) Use Case Results (M36)


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Deliverables and Milestones

Deliverable Features: Title

WP and Tasks contributing Leading Partner Month of Delivery

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a ure: ro o, epor , er Publicity: Public, EU, Private

Milestones Features: Title WP and Tasks contributing Month of Delivery Means of Verification Decision to be taken

Time organization

How we can organize the project along the time? This is one of the major challenges and it is

connected to a ood understandin of the

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effort and resources available, but also on the dependencies across the different units of the research project

The organization is connected to the general project of Project Planning

Time organization (cont)

We take the Task organization discussed above and identify the dependencies between these tasks

Then we associate a time execution range to every task Optimal, Normal, Pessimistic timings, in Months

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s s e ec ve y a grap n w c eac no e as s associated to these timings

The Critical Path Method provides a way to compute the scheduling of the project by computing the activities that are critical

A critical activity is one that if delayed it can make the whole task longer

Time organization Diagrams

We employ Activityon Node for presenting the graph

This is alternative to the Activityon Edge that

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Review Technique)

GANTT Chart GANNT chart are a special type of bar chart that allows to plan,

analyze and present the structure of e project organized in tasks Introduced by H.L. GANTT in 1919 Organizing for Work book

The X axis corresponds to time, expressed by real dates, or, during planning, by Months

The Y axis corresponds to the hierarchical structure of the project made of WPs and Task

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1. Slots of execution of each Task2. Connections as dependencies between Tasks3. Milestones as verification points

GANTT Chart Style

Many styles of GANTT are possible also highlighting progress

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Gantto(Cloud Based)

GanttProject (Open Source)


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GANTT Example Mentor GANTT Example TIPPS Project

http://www.tipss-fp7.eu/?p=about&m=work

GANTT Example Adamantium Project

http://www.ict-adamantium.eu/methodology.html

GANTT Example EUCLIPSE Project

Risk Analysis A research project of

some interest has several risks associated to its execution

Many types of risks: Scientific Risks due

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to the nature of the investigation

Technological Risks due to unknown uncertainty in the technology

Risks connected to the management of the collaboration (partner leaving)

Risk Analysis

The research plan should be aware of the risks that could be present and prepare a contingency plan to face them

What happens if a key experiment fail in deliverin results?

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E.g. in the case of human experimentation?

A contingency plan is typically a comparison between1. Specific risk in a given WP2. Acton to prevent the risk, or action in case the risk

becomes true


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Impact

A critical

evaluation

point

of

Research

Project

is

the

Impact Impact is many things and is as challenging as the scientific

objective Which types of Impact?

Scientific Impact

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How the project results could potentially change the scientific field. This means also how much interesting are the proposed results

Society Impact How the results are capable of impacting society in the short term, or

eventually in the long term. Is there any direct connection with industry or technology?

Impact can be connected to the expected impact proposed by the calls or by the proposed lines of impact of the funding scheme E.g. the EU Digital Agenda

Exploitation and Dissemination

These two

aspects

are

part

of

the

Impact

and

important

for

large

scale projects

Exploitation is the possibility of transforming directly the research results into products Which is the patent policy on the results? Which is the connection with companies in the project? Is there any

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sp n o p an or poss ty o commerc a zat on Dissemination corresponds to the set of actions to making the

research results publicly available Classically through Conferences and Journals Also through fairs or other channels and media as social networks Is there any dissemination policy through Open Sourcing? Workshops and Summer Schools Websites (mandatory)

Management

Management in Research Project describes the decision structure and the procedures prepared for dealing with the collaboration

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Specifically critical for collaborative EU project How research is monitored during the time? Who takes the decisions? How assessment is performed internally? Get help from your Administrative group

Management (example)

Example from FP7 PREDATOR (5 Uni, 3 Biz) Embedded Systems domain

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The Budget

Every call has its own peculiarities for the definition of the budget Few concepts detailed here

For the rest get help of the Administrative staff Most projects are based con cofinancing

E.g. 60% financed by Europe The rest rovided b the Institution throu h staff

Terms of the Budget Personnel Equipment Travels Consumables

The key point is a good estimate of the effort as the number of people and their participation across the work packages Mapping between Person Months (effort) of each WP to the number

of people to the cost of people by type (PostDoc,PhD,)

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Project Evaluation

Criteria depends on the call but anyway a reasonably priority for fundamental research projects

1. Novelty is the starting point of the evaluation

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. Is the project realistic? Have the risks been covered?

3. Impact of the projects results Depending also on the consortium

4. (Industrial) Exploitation of results


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Nice but

A grant application is not science; it is the marketing of science.

J.L. Ferrara and A.H. Schmaier

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The Abstract

A key

point

of

the

proposal

is

the

Abstract

that

introduces

the research grant, as much as it introduces a paper

The function of the abstract is to describe succinctly every major aspect of the proposed project.

In synthesis:

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ac groun Problem Objective Strategy Significance

Not the same abstract for different purpose: Technical vsLay Abstracts

Robohow AbstractEnabling robots to competently perform everyday manipulation activities such as household chores exceeds, in terms of task, activity, behaviour and context complexity, anything that we have so far investigated in motion planning, cognitive robotics, autonomous robot control and artificial intelligence at large. For achieving robust, adaptive, effective and natural performance of everyday manipulation tasks, it is not feasible to expect that programmers can equip the robots with plan libraries that cover such open ended task spectrum competently. RoboHow.Cog targets at enabling autonomous robots to perform expanding sets of human scale everyday manipulation tasks both in human working and living environments. To this end RoboHow.Co will investi ate a knowled e enabled and

B

P

O

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. , . plan based approach to robot programming and control where knowledge for accomplishing everyday manipulation tasks is semi automatically acquired from instructions in the World Wide Web, from human instruction and demonstration (videos), and from haptic demonstration. The knowledge enabled control will be made possible through extensions of constraint and optimization based movement specification and execution methods that allow for the force adaptive control of movements to achieve the desired effects and avoid the unwanted ones. In addition, novel perception mechanisms satisfying the knowledge preconditions of plans and monitoring the effects of actions will make the RoboHow.Cog approach feasible.The software components that will come out of RoboHow.Cog will be integrated into complete generic robot control systems such as ROS, and, in particular, into Aldebaran's humanoid platform Romeo. RoboHow.Cog will strive to make the code of many of its components and even of large parts of the Milestone demonstrations publicly available under free/open source software licenses.

St

Si

Elements of a project

parts description

Title Title of the project

Acronym Short name of the project

Objectives Final goal to be reached

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Consortium Partners and their roles

Approach Methodology and tools to be used

State of the art Existing related work and similar projects

Novel contributions How the project advances the state of the art

References List of papers cited in the state of the art

Risk analysis Difficulties and possible backup actions

Elements of a project

parts description

Structure Set of work packages and tasks

Timing Start dates and durations of each task

Dependencies Precedence graph of the tasks

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Milestones Points in time to deliver intermediate results

Deliverables Technical reports, prototypes produced as output

Effort Person months required for each work package

Money Amount of money required

Exploitation & dissemination How to use and teach the results

Management How to coordinate the project

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Types of Projects

Several types of funding are possible with different scales of project complexity Local project (Foundations, Regionals)

National projects (FIRB, PRIN, MoH) European projects

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FIRB Futuro in Ricerca

FIRB FONDO INCENTIVO PER LA RICERCA DI BASE After the PhD projects, at least 2 years after the PhD Small Consortia of 12 units Two phase evaluation

Preselection on key idea and proposer Full Proposal on Impact, Background and Team

Examples of FIRB@SSSA: MYHAND: Myoelectric Hand prosthesis with Afferent

Non invasive feedback Delivery Coherent Optical Networks for Terabit Channels

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PRIN

PRIN Programma di Ricerca di interesse Nazionale Project for professors and researchers Large projects and consortia Two phase selection

Full proposal

Examples of PRIN@SSSA Le proprieta' distributive e le determinanti economiche

della dinamica di crescita di imprese e paesi OPENHAND: Piattaforma aperta di neuro protesi di mano

per sperimentazioni cliniche

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European Projects

Different sizes and objectives The EU Research framework is organized in

Framework Programmes. The current one is FP7 2007 2013

The next one is called Horizon 2020 and it

should start from beginning of 2014 The presented material is about FP7 because

Horizon 2020 is still in preparation

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FP7 Components

FP7 Research is organized in 5 branches Cooperation : joint research initiatives Ideas : personal projects Peo le : mobilit Capacities : infrastructure

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FP7 Numbers

Funded projects (so far): Total: 20164 FP7People: 8627 FP7IDEASERC: 3446 FP7ICT: 1882

Coordinated by Italy: 1571 FP7 Call 10 in ICT: 110M FP7 Budget: 50B on 7 years

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FP7 Ideas

The key funding scheme is the one of ERC supporting

Two levels ERC Starting (much like Italian FIRB) ERC Advanced (for professors)

Example of Italian ERCs (77 listed) NEUROINT How the brain codes the past to

predict the future

See also ERC Starting experience by an Italian http://strega.unile.it/buffa.pdf

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FP7 Ideas

ERC Budget in M

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FP7 People

Marie Curie Actions provided support for people traveling around different research institutions

Each application is anyway a Research Project focused on the single researcher

Different levels of participation Initial Training Lifelong Training Industry academia International dimension

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FP7 Cooperation

Cooperation was a way to organize researchcollaboration between different entities.

Specifically in ICT the following Funding Schemeswere available:

Collaborative Projects (CP) n egra e ro ec Focused projects (STREP)

Networks of Excellence (NoE) Coordination and support actions (CSA) Coordination or Networking Actions (CA)

Support Actions (e.g. euRobotics)

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FP7 Collaborative Projects

Research aiming at developing new knowledge, new technology, products, demonstration activities or common resources for research

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FP7 Integrated Projects

Activities research and technology development activities demonstration activities technology transfer or take up activities training activities dissemination activities consortium management activities other activities

Multiple research lines with strong connection with industry

Examples of Integrated Projects RoboHow SAPHARI (e.g. 8.3M funding, 972 PM in 4 years, 11 partners)

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FP7 Focused Projects (STREP)

Targetting a specific objective in a clearly defined project approach

Two key activities Research and Technological Development Demonstration Activity

Smaller in size and scope, less needed participationof industry

Examples of STREP RoboSkin PREDATOR (3M on 8 partners)

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FP7 Support Action

Supporting Activities across Research Conferences, seminars, working groups and expert

groups Studies, analysis Fact findings and monitoring Preparatory technical work, including feasibility

studies Development of research or innovation strategies High level scientific awards and competitions; Operational support, data access and dissemination,

information and communication activities

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FP7 Future Emerging Technology

Special type of EU Research Project of ICT with high risk high gain

Objectives are higher in terms of progress The risk is not in the capacity of performing

the research but in the results. E.g.: Physics related limitations previously unknown Human related measurements

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FP7 Future Emerging Technology

Example of topics and challenges

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Toward Horizon 2020

Three priorities Excellent science Industrial leadership Societal challenges

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Alternative paths to components & systems Future Internet Robotics and smart Spaces Next Generation Computing Content Technologies and Information Management

Simplified rules and lessons learned from FP7

oo uc or our ro ec s

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