CS 536 Project

General Description

Choose a topic to explore that is related to one of the topics that we are studying in CS 536. These topics include how the human brain might work, ant colony optimization, and machine learning. You should then do something interesting with this topic. For example, you could choose to make an improvement to a machine learning approach and document both the strengths and the weaknesses of your improvement. If you write code, you can use any programming language that you wish. Furthermore, you can also use existing resources such as the machine learning algorithms found at Weka.

Most research takes place in a collaborative setting. Therefore, everyone is required to work on the project with exactly one partner.

Project Proposal

A hardcopy of your well-written proposal should be given to John no later than the start of class on Wednesday, March 5. The document should use 12 point font and use one and one-half spacing. The document should include the following:

• Project title, authors and date.
• A problem statement section. Clearly state the problem that you plan to investigate.
• A significance section. What is the potential impact (economic, scientific, etc.) of your investigation?
• A background research section. Provide an overview of important research that your investigation will build upon.
• A preliminary work section. Present any preliminary work that you have done.
• A future work section. Describe carefully the work that will be carried out to complete the project. What results do you generally anticipate?
• A bibliography section.

Exemplary Proposals

• Tim Hahn and Shen Wan
• Chris Colson and Kristie Simpson

Project Paper

A hardcopy of your final paper should be given to John no later than the start of class on Wednesday, April 30. The paper should be formatted using the guidelines for AAAI-08 papers. However, there is no length restriction on the paper - make the paper as long as it needs to be, but no longer!

The paper should have similar sections to the proposal. However, the preliminary work section should now be renamed the results section. This section should carefully describe the work that you have done and analyze/interpret the results. One of the goals of this section is to provide enough information to enable a reader to reconstruct the work that you have done. The future work section should now describe interesting future lines of research that could be pursued after this semester is finished. This section can also mention any improvements that you would make to your reported work.

Project Demonstration - Tuesday, May 6th

Each team will meet with John to give a 30 minute project demonstration on Tuesday, May 6th. All team members should be present for the meeting. Be prepared to demonstrate your system (either on a laptop that you bring or via the internet). Send John an e-mail no later than Wednesday, April 30th. The time slots will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

• 9:00 a.m. - Kristie and Chris
• 11:00 a.m. - David and Nick
• 1:30 p.m. - Jeff and Rich
• 2:30 p.m. - Promethea
• 3:30 p.m. - Ben and Paul
• 4:30 p.m. - Shen and Tim

Project Presentation

Project presentations will take place during the regularly scheduled final time. The requirements of a presentation are as follows:

• The total time for a presentation is 20 minutes.
• Powerpoint must be used for making the presentation.
• Each partner must make half of the presentation.
• At least 5 minutes must be set aside for questions and answers.
• The presentation slides must be concise and informative.
• Bring a printout of your presentation slides to class on this day to hand to John.