Principles of Artificial Intelligence

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Principles of Artificial Intelligence: Term Projects

Term Projects and Papers

Students enrolled in Com S 572 and Com S 472H (Honors) are required to complete a research or design project in AI on a topic to be chosen in consultation with the instructor. A written report on the project and a brief oral presentation summarizing the same is expected at the end of the semester. You may choose to work individually or in small groups (consisting of 2-3 members each) on the project. An ideal project for 572 students should be one that demonstrates some creativity, attempts to answer some interesting research question(s), or offers an interesting AI solution to a problem of practical interest. Those of you who are interested in pursuing research in AI or a topic that involves some AI are strongly encouraged to select a topic that could get you started on such research. The results of the project should be written up in the form of a scholarly manuscript modeled after articles that appear in major AI conferences (e.g., AAAI, ICML)

Students enrolled in Com S 472 are required to complete a short (approximately 7-10 pages, single-spaced) term paper on one of the topics covered in the course. The paper should ideally be based on independent study of some topic extending beyond the material discussed in class. For example, this might involve extending the code developed for one of the laboratory assignments in interesting ways and describing the results, or completing a small research or design project in AI and reporting the results. You may choose to work individually or in small groups (consisting of 2-3 members each) on the term paper. The paper should be written in the form of a scholarly manuscript (with citations to relevant literature).

Term project is in essence, a research project. You may make use of all the resources available at your disposal, including the published work of others, publicly available code, publicly available data sets, as well as consultation with others (fellow students, faculty, or other experts on the topic of your project). Note however, that your conduct of the project should be guided by the best practices of academic research and writing.

In particular, you should exercise utmost care to avoid plagiarism: the deliberate use of someone else's language, ideas, data, code, or other original material that is not common knowledge without properly acknowledging the source. You should also familiarize yourself with appropriate ways to acknowledge the contributions of others and to cite all your sources (See for example, ISU library's index of resources for avoiding plagiarism).

Students may choose to work in teams of 2 or 3 members on the term project. Collaboration within a team is expected and encouraged. Each team member is expected to contribute to all aspects of the project: including conception of the initial idea, planning, implementation (including design and analysis of algorithms, design, implementation, and testing of code, experimental evaluation) and reporting (including organization and writing of the report). However, because each individual brings unique abilities to a team, and one of the goals of working in a team is to take advantage of the unique abilities of the team members, it is not unusual for the contributions of individual team members to vary across tasks. To ensure that each team member gets credit for his or her contributions, the final report should include a statement of contributions that explicitly identifies the contributions of each team member and a statement that every team member concurs with the contents of the report. To avoid possible misunderstanding, it is advisable to for the each group to meet with the instructor and discuss each member's role with the instructor before beginning to work on the project. If there are irreconcilable differences among members your team, you should notify the course staff as early as possible (but after having made a good faith effort to resolve the differences among yourselves) so we can help resolve the differences or suggest alternatives. In the event that the dispute among team members is not resolved to everyone's satisfaction, the instructor's assessment (if necessary, based on discussions with by each member) will be binding.

If your background is in another discipline (e.g., engineering, biological sciences, business, etc.) you are encouraged to pick a topic that would allow you to explore the application of AI to a solve a problem of interest in your area of expertise.

Suggested Topics

The list of topics given below is meant to be suggestive, but not exhaustive.

Design, implement, and evaluate some simple Semantic web application for applications such as
- web search
- discovering and visualizing conceptual relations among documents
Design, implement and evaluate an AI/machine learning algorithm for use in an application such as
- news or email spam filtering
- personalized information retrieval and recommendation from the web for news articles, movies, or music
- a personal assistant for meeting scheduling
- classification of macromolecular sequences
- an application of your choice (discuss it with the instructor first)
Comparative evaluation of alternative AI-based machine learning approaches on a broad range of classification tasks
Design, implementation, and evaluation of deductive capabilities to a database
Design and implementation and experimental evaluation of tools for reasoning with Bayesian networks
Design, implementation, and evaluation of a system for organizing and storing, and context-specific retrieval of life experiences
Design, implementation, and evaluation of a system for facilitating community formation (e.g., on the web)

The descriptions given here are rather brief, so please feel free to talk to the instructor to explore possible project ideas in greater detail. You are also encouraged to look at current research in the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory for project ideas.

Term Project Timeline

Form your group and select a project or term paper topic. Prepare a brief (1 paragraph) outline of the project or term paper and list of group members as well as the role of each member is due on or before September 30, 2006. 2005.
Create a web page for your project, including a brief summary of the goals of the project, the basic approach to be followed, and anticipated results along with the relevant bibliography and email the URL to the instructor and the TA by October 15, 2006.
Add links to a draft version of your paper (in postscript or PDF form), code, results, illustrations, demos, etc. as appropriate and email the URL to the TA and the instructor on or before November 21, 2006. Some of these materials may be unfinished.
The final version of the project report / term paper accompanied by all the source code, relevant data, and experimental results, should be posted on the project web page and the URL emailed to honavar@cs.iastate.edu with cc to oksayakh@cs.iastate.edu by 11:59pm, November 30, 2006.

Instructions for Preparing the Term Paper

The term paper will be graded on the basis of originality, technical soundness, organization, clarity of presentation, grammar and style, adequacy of the bibliography, as well as the significance of the results. In short, it will be evaluated as though it is being refereed for presentation at a conference. You are encouraged to look at papers published in one of the major national or international conferences (e.g., AAAI, ICML) as a model for your term paper. You are strongly encouraged to use AAAI's latex macros or word templates avalable here.