B652: Machine Learning
Spring 2007
Final Project Writeups

Final project writeups are due on the next-to-last day of classes (Monday, April 23) at the start of class.

1. A well-documented copy of your program. (If code is very lengthy, electronic-only submission may be best; please talk with me.)
2. A paper describing the problem you are addressing, the methods you have chosen to address them, the motivations for those methods, and, most importantly, what you have learned from the project. This should be a maximum of 6 pages in the AAAI two-column conference format (roughly 5000 words). AAAI author instructions and LaTeX and Word templates are available for download.
3. Additional sample output with very brief annotations to give a more complete picture of how the program works and what it can do.

An excellent project will address interesting questions, try to overcome hard problems, come up with creative approaches for solving them, and examine not only the strengths but also the limitations of the approach. If you devised a creative method that failed to work, that's fine too! The point of the paper will then be what you learned about the problem and method, and ideas for exploiting what you learned.

Please try to write as clearly and concisely as you can---expressing key ideas concisely is a writing skill that will be very valuable as you write future conference papers! Please include sample program output to illustrate your program's points. Including an appendix of supplementary output is fine, and does not count towards the length limit. If you are unsure of what to include or what to aim for in the writeup, I'd be happy to talk about it!

Grading for the written materials will be based on:

Problem (25%)

Is it interesting and challenging?

Model (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.)

Paper (20%)

Writing

Motivation

Relation to other work (think critically about the how your work relates to other research)

Analysis of strengths+weaknesses

Clarity on program (All major points should be described, but at a high level)

Program (20%)

Implementation of model

Please let me know if you have any questions, and have fun on the project---I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with!