W3 Thu Pre-class Assignment: Research Proposal preliminary work and learning LaTeX

In this assignment you will familiarize yourself with Overleaf and LaTeX, and start to put together your proposal.  This is a group assignment, but you should make sure that everyone is familiar with Overleaf and LaTeX.  You will submit the PDF document (one document per group) that you download from Overleaf at the end of this assignment.

Working with LaTeX in Overleaf

You will be writing your proposal in Overleaf, which is an online collaborative LaTeX editor.   LaTeX is a document creation tool that is widely used in CS reseach, so learning LaTeX will be essential.

Find your proposal

I have made a very basic proposal document for each group and shared it will all team members.   You should receive an invitation by the start of Week 3.  Find your proposal document on Overleaf, and contact Christine and Vignesh if you cannot find it.

Complete some LaTeX tutorials

Spend about 1 hour learning LaTeX and overleaf.  We recommend the tutorials here: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Tutorials.  You can do this together or individually.

Add some formatted text or some changes to your proposal document to demonstrate what you have learned.  It doesn't have to be real text or information.  Just something to show you've done some learning.  It could be a bulleted list of the things you've learned, or a table of your names, or whatever you want.

Add a BibTeX file and a citation

We will be using BibTeX for references in your proposal.  Complete the following steps following this BibTeX information guide for information as to how to do each.

1. Add a .bib file to your project.
2. In the .bib file add an entry for the research paper you read in week 2.
3. Add commands to your main.tex to use this .bib file as the bibliography as the bibliography for your proposal.  Hint: You'll need to include two lines that look something like:
   

   \bibliographystyle{plain} % We choose the "plain" reference style
   \bibliography{refs} % Entries are in the "refs.bib" file

4. In the body of your proposal (in the main.tex file in your project, or another file if you've gotten fancy and split your text until multiple files), add at least one reference to the paper you added to your bibliography, using the \cite command. 

Make sure you compile your document and that everything shows up correctly in the preview.

Add an initial problem statement/approach to your proposal

Together with your group,  add two paragraphs to your proposal.  (Don't worry about formatting or where they go or anything.  You will be incorporating this problem statement into your introduction as you write the first part of your proposal in a couple of weeks).

1. One paragraph should state the research problem that your group will be tackling this year.     
2. A second paragraph should state how you might be approaching this problem.  If your advisor has given you any specific direction in solving this problem, describe what they have told you.  If not, list any ideas you have (they don't have to be correct!) for starting to solve this problem? 

Submission

Download your proposal from Overleaf as a PDF document and submit it here on Canvas.  It will be messy and it doesn't need to be coherent overall, but it should contain:

• The reference to your paper from week 2 (inline and in the references section)
• The paragraph with your problem statement
• Some edits you have made to show off what you learned in your LaTeX tutorials