**Topic Proposal** CS 190 [Back to landing page](../index.html) In this course, you will be completing semester-long individual project proposals or you will be working on your theses. All theses and proposals will include a literature review of a particular, focused research area as well as proposing a new research project in that area. If you have already opted to do a computer science thesis or project and been accepted by an advisor, your literature review will be the related work section for your thesis or project and your new research proposal will be a plan for your thesis or project. Otherwise, you may choose any research area that relates to the topic of your 190 section. Eventually, your chosen research area should be narrow enough that your literature review includes all (or most) published computer science papers in that area. # Choosing A Research Area Your research area should relate to the topic of your 190 section and should be something that you are excited about learning more about. Other than that, the area is up to you. If you already have an idea, great! If not, we recommend looking at recent conferences and journals in relevant areas to see what sort of research is going on pertaining to those general subjects (most conference websites have a schedule page in which papers are organized into sessions by topic, which can be a convenient way to discover research areas). We also encourage you to meet with your 190 prof to help you identify and narrow down ideas. Examples of research areas chosen for 190 papers in previous years are given below. We've also provided a list of relevant conferences and journals for each of the 190 sections. # Example Areas The following are a few examples of senior theses and projects that were selected by students in previous years. These examples are only to provide you with a general idea of the sorts of areas people have selected in the past. You should choose your own research area, not one of the areas listed. * Visualization tools for privacy policies * Measuring compliance with california privacy laws * Defending federated learning models against adversarial examples * Hardware-based side channel attacks * Model predictive control in video game environments * Differentially private federated fine-tuning of foundation models for hate speech detection * Can machines understand? # Relevant Conferences To help you explore the space of sub-areas, the following are a list of conferences that regularly publish research in areas relevant to each of the current 190 sections. For the next assignment, you will complete a literature review of your chosen area. You will be required to have a specified minimum number of references from the venues listed below. We don't want to eliminate other possible venues, but we do want to point you toward (mostly) reputable venues. In the past, students have relied too heavily on articles that were not peer-reviewed (e.g., entire literature reviews with papers from solely arxiv) or from dubious sources. 1. Human-Computer Interaction * **Note**: papers should be "full papers" and not "extended abstracts/adjunct proceedings" * Top choices * [ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems](https://chi2026.acm.org/) * [ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)](https://dl.acm.org/journal/tochi) * [ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)](https://uist.acm.org/) * [ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW)](https://cscw.acm.org/) * [ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS)](https://dis.acm.org/) * [ACM Creativity and Cognition (C&C) Conference](https://cc.acm.org/2025/) * [Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing Conference (UbiComp)](https://www.ubicomp.org/sc/index.html) * Also acceptable * [ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)](https://iui.acm.org/) * [ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT)](https://facctconference.org/) * [ACM SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) Conference](https://s2025.siggraph.org/) * [ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)](https://humanrobotinteraction.org/) 2. Efficient Modern Computer Architecture * Top choices * [International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS)](https://www.asplos-conference.org/) * [International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA)](https://iscaconf.org/) * [International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)](https://hpca-conf.org/) * [IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)](https://microarch.org/) * Also acceptable * [International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT)](https://pact2025.github.io/) * [IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC)](https://iiswc.org/) * [IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS)](https://ispass.org/ispass2025/) * General by maybe relevant * [USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI)](https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi25) * [Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP)](https://sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2025/) 3. Vulnerable and Secure Systems and Architectures * Top choices * [USENIX Security Symposium](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity25) * [IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy](https://sp2025.ieee-security.org/) * [Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium](https://www.ndss-symposium.org/) * [ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)](https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2025/) * Also acceptable * [Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS)](https://petsymposium.org/) * [Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS)](https://www.usenix.org/conference/soups2025) 4. Robots, Autonomous Systems, and Humans * Conferences * [International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)](https://www.ieee-ras.org/conferences-workshops/financially-co-sponsored/iros) * [IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)](https://www.ieee-ras.org/conferences-workshops/fully-sponsored/icra) * [IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE)](https://www.ieee-ras.org/conferences-workshops/fully-sponsored/case) * [Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)](https://roboticsconference.org/) * [Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)](https://www.corl.org/) * [IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR)](https://cvpr.thecvf.com/) * Journals * [IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (I-RAL)](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=7083369) * [IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=8860) * [International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR)](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/IJR) * [Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing](https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/robotics-and-computer-integrated-manufacturing) * [Science Robotics](https://www.science.org/journal/scirobotics) 5. Machine Learning and Generative AI * Conferences * [AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Digital Entertainment](https://aiide.org) * [Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)](https://neurips.cc/) * [International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)](https://iclr.cc/) * [International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)](https://icml.cc/) * [Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI)](https://www.auai.org/uai2024/) * Journals * [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=34) # What to Submit Submit your proposal to [gradescope](https://www.gradescope.com/). See gradescope for instructions on exactly what to submit.