Principles of Artificial Intelligence
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Term Projects and Papers
Students enrolled in the course 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 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)
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, resources for avoiding plagiarism: http://www.plagiarism.org).
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 an AI/machine learning algorithms for applications such as
- personalized recommendation of news articles, movies, music, friends, etc.
- analysis and prediction of molecular interactions and networks
- literature-based discovery
- annotating images with labels
- organizing text collections into topics
- organizing, storing, and retrieval of life experiences
- causal discovery from observations and experiments
- organizing and visualizing relations among documents
- personalizing educational experiences
- an application of your choice (discuss it with the
instructor first)
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 November 18, 2017.
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- 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 November 18, 2017.
- 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 December 10, 2017.
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 vhonavar@ist.psu.edu by 11:59pm, December 15, 2017.
In addition, the project report should be uploaded through Canvas at the same time
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.
Additional resources on research and writing can be found on the Graduate Research
and Writing page.
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