• General Information
The Interim Report is the first formal written summary of your project’s work. It should ideally include a proper literature review and introduction to your problem, your problem description in detail and the solutions you have envisaged/attempted, followed by the results obtained so far. A summary of the work done, and a clear project plan, e.g. in the form of a Gantt chart, for the summer, constitute the final chapter of your report. Appendices, where appropriate, follow the last chapter. The acceptable word count for the main chapters of your report is 3500-4500 words. The original final report in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format must be submitted electronically, by11:59PM on 27 April 2016, via Turnitin to the module’s VLE; See folder “Interim Report: Submission”. All additional files, such as your programming codes, must be zipped into one file and be submitted electronically to the designated section on the aforementioned folder. If requested by the supervisor and/or the assessor, hard copies of your report must also be handed in to the SSO by 4:00PM on the following business day. You can find out, on the Supervisor Info page, whether your assessor and supervisor wish to have a hard copy or not.
How to write your Interim report
Formatting
A word template file, Template_ELEC5881M_Interim_Report.dotx, has been provided on this page and it must be strictly followed when preparing your report. (A partial latex template has been provided too, but its consistency with the original word template must be verified by the user.) The template provides you with guidelines about what font size and line spacing to use for different parts of your report. Fill in the relevant sections on the template and structure your report in multiple chapters. Below, I will describe different parts of a typical technical report. Please also attend the lecture on Technical Writing scheduled in your timetable. If you are using other software than Microsoft office, please make sure you adhere to the same formatting guidelines illustrated in the provided template.
Structure
A technical report consists of several parts. Here, I briefly describe each part and provide you with a few tips on how to professionally write each part. Note that these points are general, and for your specific report it is best to consult with your supervisor how to structure your report.
• Title page: If you are not happy with the title you chose when you proposed your project, here is a chance to choose a better title for your project. Choose a title that is sufficiently broad to cover all elements included in your project, and specific enough to help the reader focus on your subject of interest. It is uncommon to use full sentences as titles. Sometime, to break long titles, it is helpful to use “:” to narrow down a general topic to the scope of your project. For example: “Quantum repeaters with imperfect memories: Cost and scalability”. More information on how to choose a proper title can be found on ELEC3870 notes.
• Abstract: An abstract is a piece of advert for your project. In less than one page, you will tell the reader what problem you are going to address, what approaches you will take, and what results you will get. In a journal publication, an abstract is typically a single paragraph with present/future tense tone. For your report, you have the freedom to split your abstract into more paragraphs, if needed, so long as you follow the template formatting and the one-page restriction.
• Table of Contents: A common part of long reports such as yours. In your word template, you just need to press “Update Table …”, on top of the page, to automatically generate a table of contents for your report, provided that you used proper style headings in your word file.
• List of Acronyms: It will be very helpful to include such a list in your report. Each acronym must be spelled out fully the first time that it appears in the text. For example, “Quantum key distribution (QKD) enables two remote parties …”. Note that you must not capitalise all the words unless they are capitalised for another reason, such as being the first word of a sentence or a special name. If you use an acronym in your abstract, you should define it there as well as the first time it appears in the main text. I suggest that once you introduce an acronym, you add it to your list-of-abbreviation page. In the end you can sort them in alphabetic order.
• Chapters: The core of your report is split into multiple chapters. The less important part, or where details distract the reader from the main point of your report, can be included as appendices. Note that the word limit only applies to the main chapters, and not appendices. Although there is some flexibility on how to structure your material into different chapters, the common structure includes an introductory chapter, followed by a detailed problem description, chapters on how you address your problem and possibly solve it, a chapter on results and discussions around it, followed by a summary chapter, which, in the case of interim report, must clearly span a plan for the remaining parts of the project.
• Introduction: This is the first chapter in your report, the main goal of which is to lay the ground for the specific problem of interest you will address in the rest of your report. It should include some literature review around your topic of project, justifies the importance and the relevance of your project, and without getting into too much detail describe the topic of your project and how your report is structured. A good practice for your first paragraph of your introduction is to start from the broader topic of your project and narrow it down to your specific topic of interest by the last sentence. Effectively, in one paragraph, you tell the whole story very succinctly to your audience. The last paragraph of your introduction explains the structure of your project, e.g., “The rest of this report is organised as follows. In Chapter 2, the mathematical model used is fully described, … . Chapter 5 concludes the report and sketches a time plan for future work.”
• Conclusions and Future Work: This is the last chapter of your report, and the only one that commonly uses past-tense verbs. It summarises the report into a few paragraphs by describing again what problem has been addressed, and by highlighting the results obtained. How you are planning to complete your project in the remaining time, and a clear week-by-week time plan to do it will be included in this chapter as well (not in past-tense, of course).
• Appendices: Use appendices to include lengthy derivations, supporting material you don’t want to include in the core of your report, program codes you many need to include, or anything else, which is while related to your project does not make your report more readable if you include it in the main text. There is no word limit for your appendices.
• References: This is the last part of your report, and it includes all references you have cited anywhere else in your report. You have two options for your reference styles for listing your references, which has been explained in the given template and its supporting material. The main idea behind the introduced styles is to use something similar to the IEEE Reference style for your citations. You have the option to either use a numerical format, or a hybrid numero-alphabetical one. Note that the IEEE style uses different formatting for articles, versus books, or online resources and so on. Check out some examples in the given file IEEE-refguide.pdf below.
• Figure/Tables: It is a common practice that technical documents are skimmed through by checking first the table of contents, or, equivalently, titles of chapters, sections, and subsections, as well as charts, tables, and figures. It is therefore highly important to structure your report into proper sections and subsections, and to provide full captions for figures and tables, so that one can understand them with minimal reference to the text. Also note that the labels on your figures may downsize when you are scaling down your graphs. Use proper font size and thickness for your graphs to make them readable in their final versions.
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Word Template
Attached Files:
o Template_ELEC5881_Interim_Report.dotx (39.444 KB)
Save the template on your computer.
Now, either
Click on the template and save it as a new file,
or
Open Microsoft Word
From the Office button click New
In the New Document window, select “New from existing”
Navigate to the location of the template on your computer
Select the template file
Click Create New
My Project topic :
This project is a mostly CAD based project where you will be learning about microwave design methodologies. Initially the design is based on passive approaches then if you progress well you can design some microwave amplifiers and then if you progress really well there’s scope for you to make some measurements – but your project mark is not contingent reaching any particular milestone but on what you learn.
Active multi-element retro-reflective microwave antenna design. fabrication and evaluation The work would ideally suit someone with a interest in RF antenna design and communications.
The concept would be to design an array of patch antennas connected together in a van-Atta type of arrangement so that a received signal is naturally retro reflected and then to include in line amplifiers
and power splitters to give a retro-reflected gain.
