CS 538 Spring 2021
Project Ideas
How can you pick a good research project topic? Your taste for projects will evolve over years, but to get started, here are a few places to look.
Workshops and conferences
- Browse programs at the top conferences to see current research topics.
- Workshops often contain early work on "hot" new directions, raising more questions than answers. Browse the SIGCOMM or NSDI sites to see the latest workshops attached to the main conferences.
- HotNets, HotCloud, and HotOS are stand-alone workshops that focus on early stage research and position papers. The short papers in the Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR, formerly HotSDN) are of a similar nature.
Survey papers and lists of open problems
- Our class list of suggested project ideas (discussed in lecture)
- Forty Data Communications Research Questions (Partridge, CCR 2011)
- The Cost of a Cloud: Research Problems in Data Center Networks (Albert Greenberg, James Hamilton, David A. Maltz, Parveen Patel)
- Cloud Computing: Recent trends, challenges and open problems (Andres Lagar-Cavilla and Kaustubh Joshi tutorial at SIGMETRICS 2011; PPT handout available)
- Security for Cloud Computing (Nahrstedt and Campbell, workshop report including some open problems)
- Hypervisors as a Foothold for Personal Computer Security: An Agenda for the Research Community (Matei Zaharia, Sachin Katti, Chris Grier, Vern Paxson, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, and Dawn Song, 2012)