ComS 573: Machine Learning
Department of Computer Science
Iowa State University

Term Project

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Students enrolled in Com S 573 are required to complete a research or design project on a topic to be chosen in consultation with the instructor. A written report on the project and an oral presentation 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. If you choose to work in a group, there has to be a clear understanding of each group member's contributions to the project.

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.

An ideal project should be one that demonstrates some creativity, attempts to answer some interesting research questions, or offers an interesting machine learning solution to a problem of practical interest. 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 machine learning to solve a problem of interest in your area of expertise.

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Timeline

• By March 23, submit to the instructor and TA your project topic, an outline of what you want to accomplish during your project and how you will do it. If your project is a group project, submit your group members and a description of what each group member is doing.
• By April 6, set up project webpage skeleton (page should include your info/group members info and tasks assignment, project description, bibliography, source code, results, data, report, etc.). Send to the instructor and TA the link to your project webpage.
• April 20, project due. Submit to TA your source code, data, and the draft report, as well as make them available at the project website.
• The week of April 23 - 27, oral presentations in class, to be scheduled.
• April 27, 5pm, final report due. Submit to TA your source code, data, and the final project report, as well as make them available at the project website.

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Instructions for Preparing the Term Paper / Project Report

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. It should be presented as a technical paper and 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 encouraged to use AAAI's latex macros or word templates.

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