CS 151: Artificial Intelligence
Final Project
Due dates: 4/28 and 5/5 (or 5/7)

In this class, we've studied a number of foundational topics in AI (search, CSPs, games, probabilistic reasoning, machine learning). The purpose of the final project is for you to explore one of these topics more in-depth.

• Know who you're working with
• Know what you're working on
• Have read one paper each related to your project
• Have collected the data you'll need
• Be working on cleaning the data and implementing your approach

On April 28th, we will have in-class project updates. Each group will speak for 5 minutes and will submit a rough draft of their final write up. The goal of these presentations is to help you clarify your problem and your approach and to ensure you don't wait until the last minute to do all of the work!

For the in-class project updates, you can choose to just speak, use the white board, or prepare a short (e.g. one-slide) presentation summarizing your project. Regardless, your project updates should include:

• A clear statement of the problem
• A clear outline of the steps that you have, are, or will take to solve the problem. For example, "We've already scraped the data we'll be using from website X and website Y. Now that we have the data, we're working on extracting certain features: describe features here. Then, we're going to be using classifiers provided on website Z to do the classification. We'll evaluate our system by computing precision and recall on a set of held out data points".
• A timeline of the remaining steps to be done for your project

In addition, each group will hand in a rough draft of the final paper. Your final papers will be typed in LaTeX using the AAAI LaTeX template (see below). I highly recommend you write your rough draft in LaTeX using this template. Your rough draft should include:

• The title of the paper along with the names of the authors (i.e. team members)
• A 1-sentence to 1-paragraph motivation for your work. (Why should anyone care about what you're doing?)
• A 1-paragraph description of the problem you will solve. (To be turned into an Introduction section)
• A 1-3 paragraph description of how you plan to solve the problem. (To be turned into a System Description section)
• What results you aim to obtain and how you will evaluate your approach. (To be turned into a Results section)
• Citation information for any relevant literature. (To be turned into the Bibliography)

The last two days of class (May 5th and May 7th) will be the project presentations. The location is our normal classroom and breakfast food will be provided!

• Why should I (or anyone else care) about what you did? (i.e. motivation)
• What specific technical problem did you solve?
• How did you solve this problem?
• Why did you choose this particular solution out of all the possible solutions that exist?
• How well does your solution work (and how do you know)?

Your presentations will be graded on:

• Content (Did you address each of the points above)
• Organization
• Speaking style
• Your attendance at all presentations

Use the AAAI LaTeX template for formatting your papers. You can get the template files from the AAAI authors site and use them for your paper format. Your paper should be no more than 3 pages. Keep in mind that writing a paper this short takes work and planning.

The following are common sections found in research papers:

• An Introduction that motivates and describes the problem and the results at a high level.
• A Related Works section that briefly describes existing work that solves the same (or similar) problem.
• A Background section that explains any background information necessary to understand the problem or your approach.
• A System Description section that provides the details of how you constructed your system, how it works, and how you tailored the algorithms described in the previous section to the problem at hand.
• A Results section that describes how well the system performs. A format that often works well here is to first explain your evaluation techniques, provide their results, and then explain those results and what they say about the problem and about your approach(es) to it.
• A Conclusion, usually very brief, in which you can summarize your system and the results. In addition, this is a chance to be less scientific in your opinions about the project and a chance to put it in the larger context of larger, more general problems (such as the general vision problem or a broad subfield).

You will be graded on:

• Quality of your implementation (including how well you evaluated your approach)
• Clarity of your paper
• More guidelines may be added here to address your specific project.

You will be turning in both an electronic copy and a hard copy for your paper rough draft (due 4/28 by start of class) and your final paper (due 5/5 or 5/7 by start of class). The electronic copies can be submitted using the webdropbox. The hard copies must be submitted in class.