Individual Project

Guidance for Individual Projects

The Individual Project is, for most HetSys students, the first chance to work uninterruptedly on their research project, and where the student’s sole focus becomes goal-oriented novel research. In the context of the HetSys PG Diploma, successful completion of the project not only forms a progression gateway but also provides crucial input for the peer-to-peer UQ exercise that forms the second part of PX915. The reproducible results and UQ estimates form a vital input for PX915, and both outline documents and final reports will be returned for further revision if this aspect has been neglected.

The project report and viva are not assessed for credit within a CDT module. This means it can form a seamless part of the overall PhD project and be presented in the final thesis. If this work was for credit in the PG Diploma, then under university rules it could not later form part of the PhD thesis.

This project is the final progression gateway to the PhD, so we assess its success in two ways in order that we can be confident students are ready to commit to a further three years of research on their project: a brief report on the findings structured as a research paper, and a progression viva with two examiners, chosen from the pool of supervisors with new projects this year, to discuss this report.

Individual Project Outline

The goals of the project should be discussed jointly at the start between the student and the supervisor and written up as a short document containing all of the following:

A brief project overview (around 2-300 words)
A list of bullet point “deliverables” / “goals”
A detailed description of what part of the project will constitute the documented “reproducible result” for the peer-to-peer exercise
An outline workplan
An estimate of required HPC usage (what resource, roughly what CPUh/GPUh cost)
A listing of any relevant Responsible Research and Innovation and Trusted Research and Innovation considerations associated with the project, and confirmation that these have been appropriately discussed with partners.

Plans for the project may of course evolve and change completely as it proceeds, but it is important to have a submitted outline as a record of initial plans.

This document should be uploaded to the HetSys website by the end of week 7 of the summer term (Friday 12^th June 2026).

These will be briefly reviewed by the CDT Management Board and the PX915 module leader, and supervisors and/or students will be contacted if any concerns arise. The project goals should be structured such that:

The work can produce demonstrable, discussable results during the 12-15 week timeframe before the progression vivas in September. Note most students will want to take some time off in this period and that supervisors and students may be away at conferences or other travel. This should be incorporated into the setting of realistic goals for the project.
The project should demonstrate evidence of some or all the main goals of the CDT training programme. These are: spanning of disciplinary barriers and time and/or length-scales, incorporation of uncertainty in modelling, robust software engineering, and Scientific Machine Learning.
A clearly-defined and documented “protocol” for evaluating or reproducing one specific result (literally a few numbers) from the work can be created. Ideally this should be associated with an estimate of the uncertainty or error associated with this result.

Individual Project Report

We request that students write up their findings in a final report, to be written as if it is to be submitted as a research paper. The final report should be uploaded to the HetSys website by Friday 4^thSeptember 2026 (unless by special arrangement with the examiners for a later submission).

Preparing the report as a paper does not mean that you are expected to have produced a publishable body of impactful work and polished it to perfection. Instead, the point is to learn how to structure and present your work as a narrative.

The writeup should be around 5-10 pages, formatted as if for submission to a journal, and should contain a similar level of detail in the background and introduction to a typical research paper in its field. That normally implies that it will have

i) a brief introduction with key literature references and background that underpins the paper,
ii) a methodology section that refers to other published work where appropriate, rather than trying to explain all details from scratch,
iii) a detailed results and discussion section that highlights and explains key findings,
iv) conclusions and plans for further work.

Supervisors are requested to keep the level of proof-reading of text minimal, so that it represents the students’ work rather than theirs, while advising on content, format, presentation of graphs etc (like they might for an undergraduate project, rather than for a collaborative paper). The report will form the basis of discussion in the viva, and we would be delighted if students then continued to expand on the work such that it was eventually published.

As discussed above, the report must provide information to enable full reproduction of at least one relevant result from the work, e.g. through supplementary material detailing steps to achieve this. This could entail downloading a ‘protocol’ script from an online repository (note: this does not have to be made public), compiling or locating binaries for any packages required, and running it on SCRTP hardware. This can involve some calculations, but these should be possible within moderate computational resources available to anyone in the CDT, eg a node of the hetmathsys set, ideally for no more than a few hours. For anything requiring more compute than this, pre-processed results should be provided. A reasoned estimate of the uncertainty and/or error of this chosen result must also be provided in the report. This is necessary to allow the peer-to-peer assessment as part of the PX915 module.

Individual Project Viva

Viva examinations will usually be 20-40 minutes in length and will be arranged in September following the end of the period associated with the Individual Project. The examiners will be 2 members of staff from the CDT management team, not including the project supervisors. Vivas will usually be in person but may be by videoconference by mutual agreement if necessary.

The student will be asked to present a brief overview of their project and its main findings. There will be follow-up questions to probe the student’s understanding of the project and the way the work fits into and builds on the CDT training programme. The appendix on the reproducible result will be checked to determine whether it can be followed within reason by another student – if this is not the case, improvements may be requested. General guidance for the students on oral examinations can be found on the website: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/hetsys/training/exams/

An audio recording will be taken of all oral examinations. Candidates will be asked to state their name and candidate number for the recording at the start. This may be provided to external examiners, so it should not record extraneous conversations.

Marking and Feedback

Feedback forms will be filled in during the viva by the staff – these will be provided to the students once all vivas have been completed for the cohort. Suggested minor corrections to the report should be completed and a final version uploaded to Moodle when requested around in Term 1: this version will form the basis of the information provided to the students who are using the report and associated code and data as the input for the peer-to-peer UQ exercise.

The viva will be marked on a pass/fail basis, on the basis that the student must demonstrate a sufficient understanding of their project, and engagement with the goals of the CDT, and taking into account relevant feedback from the supervisor(s).

In the event that the viva examiners were to decide the student’s plans were not yet fully convincing from the viva and report, there will be an opportunity to revise the report and resubmit it within a few weeks. If satisfactory improvement is not observed by the examiners, then the student’s progression to the PhD may be referred to the CDT management board.