B552: Knowledge-Based Computation
Spring 2008
Homework 2: Short Project Writeup and Slides

Due electronically as a pdf file and powerpoint slides by 11:30pm on Tuesday, Feb 26. Submission will be via oncourse.

This assignment involves writing a brief synopsis of your project topic and plans. The purpose of the assignment is to help clarify the goals and plans of your project and enable us to give useful feedback. You're encouraged to discuss your plans and ideas with me and other students (whether or not in your project group, or even in the class!) before you submit your project plan.

Project groups should include one or two people. Only one writeup needs to be done per project group, and this homework may be submitted by either student in a 2-person group (please be sure to include both names for two-person projects). The writeup should be approximately a page or two long.

The Project

The goal of the project is to give you a chance to do research on a topic of your choice---to critically examine an area, formulate interesting questions, creatively try to overcome problems, and analyze what you've learned from your work. In past classes, students have sometimes chosen to continue these projects beyond the class, and have even had their project work lead to research publications. Try to select a challenging topic that you care about, and don't be afraid to take risks!

There are both rich knowledge resources (e.g., OpenCyc, ConceptNet) and software resources (e.g., Montylingua, the AI microprograms, IUCBRF) available for use in your projects if you wish. See the B552 resources list for useful links.

The Writeup

The writeup should begin with a project title concisely summarizing your project. The writeup itself should describe your goals and intended methods, should make clear what you are investigating/modeling, what AI methods you intend to use, the intended I/O behavior of the system, and the problems you would like the work to address, and how you will evaluate the project's success. It should also mention both why the problem is important, what you expect to be the hardest part, and what you expect to demonstrate or learn from the project.

The Slides

On Wednesday, Feb 27, each group will make a very brief presentation (3-5 minutes) of its project plans, for discussion with the class. Please prepare 2-4 powerpoint slides to accompany this and submit them via oncourse by midnight on Feb 26, for me to combine them into a single file to streamline the presentations.

Grading criteria for the project

To help in your project design, please keep in mind that the following grading criteria will be used at the end of the semester for the projects themselves. If you're interested in a project that doesn't fit into all the aspects of this list, please talk to me in advance.

Problem (25%): Is it interesting and challenging?
Model and assessment (35%): Is the theoretical solution interesting?; Would it scale up?; Does it make theoretical claims? (E.g., saying something about needed knowledge for a task, or the strengths and weaknesses of a given process, or about what are the hard and easy parts of the problem you're attacking.) Is its performance well evaluated?
Paper (20%): Writing; Motivation; Relation to other work; Analysis of strengths+weaknesses; Clarity on program (All major points should be described, but at a fairly high level)
Program (20%): A well-documented implementation of model.