CS 151: Artificial Intelligence
Homework 6
Due date: 4/14/14 by 11:59 pm

The written portion of this assignment is a proposal for your final project. You are allowed to work in groups of up to three people for the final project. It is strongly recommended that you do so!

There are two components to the project proposal (both described in more detail below). The first component is a description of your project. This description can be submitted jointly, i.e. I only need one project description per group. The second component is a literature review and should be submitted individually, i.e. each member in your group will individually find, read, and review one journal article or conference paper related to your final project. It would be easiest if you put the project description and the individual literature reviews inside one directory.

Project Description

Please submit one project description per group. You should submit this project description as a pdf. Your project description should address (in complete sentences when applicable!) the following points:

• Please list the names of the people in your group.
• Give a clear description of your final project topic. You should state what problem your group will attempt to solve as well as motivating why this problem is important. All other details (e.g. how will you solve this problem) are asked about below.
• Give a brief description of what techniques you will use to solve the problem described above. Try to be as specific as possible. Your literature reviews will be very helpful in answering this question.
• What sources of data will you use to solve this problem?
• How will you evaluate your approach? Again, try to be as clear as possible.

Finally, note that your project descriptions do not have to be that long! One succinct, clear sentence is preferable to one rambling, disjointed paragraph.

Please find, read, and review one journal article or conference publication related to what you would like to do for your final project. The literature review will give you more exposure to current AI research, give you practice reviewing research papers, and (perhaps most importantly) help you find some background information for your final project.

1. Finding your literature

   Your first task is to select the paper you will read and review for this assignment related to your final project idea. If you are working in a team for your final project, each of you should read a different article (closely related but different) so that all of you get some different background knowledge.

   If you're stuck on where to find papers or topics, look on the Resources page

2. Read and Summarize/Review Articles

   The next phase of this assignment is the review itself. Your task is to write a critical review of your paper. The format you should use is a short-answer rather than long-essay format. That is, you should specifically address each of the points below. In your writeup you should list the point, and then give a concise, informative response to the point.

   Here are the points you must address in your review:

   • (State concisely) What problem are the authors trying to solve?
   • Summarize the approach the authors use to solve the problem. Please discuss any novel contributions the author's make (i.e. what part of their approach is their own novel contribution?)
   • Is this work technically sound? (For example, imagine yourself trying to use the authors' solution. What problems would you encounter? Are the authors' assumptions reasonable? Is the authors' solution easily implemented? Does it require tuning lots of little parameters? Does the authors' solution actually solve the problem they set forth?! How convinced are you that their solution works?)
   • What (and how much) impact will this work have (has it had) on its field? (Note: Because these papers have already been published, they hopefully have already had an impact on the their field. If your research in looking for a paper revealed the impact of this paper's work, state it. Otherwise, try to "predict" what that impact was/might be - backing up your prediction with reasoning.)

   Here are some tips for writing your review:

   • Back up your claims by citing specific examples from the paper whenever possible (not necessarily quotes, but citing paragraph 2 of the related work section for example).
   • Imagine that your comments will be read by the authors of the paper. Make your comments as constructive/helpful to them as possible.

Congratulations! You've made it to the last programming project of the semester. In this assignment, you will be asked to design a perceptron classifier, and a large-margin classifier (similar to a support vector machine). You will be using these classifiers to classify handwritten digits and pacman behavior patterns.

• You may work in pairs for this assignment as well. If you choose to work with someone else, submit only one directory. Put both of your names at the top of each file you modify.


• If you're ready to start, click here.

1. Describe the type of functions representable by each of the classifiers we've covered.
2. AIMA 18.3
3. AIMA 18.6
4. AIMA 18.5
5. AIMA 18.19
6. Construct a minimal-sized decision-tree that computes the XOR function of 2 inputs
7. Construct a support vector machine that computes the XOR function of two inputs (see AIMA 18.17)
8. Construct a neural networks by hand that computes the XOR function of two inputs (see AIMA 18.19)

For this assignment you'll be turning in two distinct directories. The first directory is the "classification" directory which should contain your modified Python files. Please rename this directory "hw6_LastNameFirstName". The second directory is related to your final project. It should contain your groups project proposal as well as the individual literature reviews. Please rename this directory "project_proposal_LastNameFirstName". Note that in each case you can just name the directory after one person in your group. Zip (compress) each directory and unpload them using this URL.