Version of April 12^th 2009

Note the change in the due date for the final version of project: Friday, April 17^th

Getting started with your project will take some effort, because initially you'll be working on a topic that you won't be very familiar with (a major reason for the full course Overview). This page describes how to work on and write up your projects at each of the required stages. It also describes what is due at each deadline:

• Initial project plan: Wednesday, January 28^th
• Mid-semester version of your project: Monday, March 16^th
• Optional final project draft: Monday, March 30^th
• Final version of project: Friday, April 17^th by 4pm by email or to my office or lab WVH 450/460 WVH or 202 WVH

I will describe a number of different projects that you can choose from. I'll help you make a tentative decision in the first class, but you can refine it, or change as late as soon after the second class - after we've gone through the full course Overview. Some ideas about how to choose your project topic are on this project suggestions page.

Important instructions as to how to structure your project paper

All the items listed below are required. You will lose points if any of them are omitted. The precise order can be varied, as long as everything is there. Some of the requirements relate to form, some to content. (My hope is that the requirements below can stand you in good stead when writing other papers and reports in school and on the job.)

• Your project paper must begin the project's title, your name, course, date of handin, my name, and "Northeastern University".


• This must be immediately followed by the Abstract of 150 to 250 words which briefly describes your topic, goals, methods, results, and evaluation. Note that an abstract is not an introduction, since in its final form it will briefly summarize your results also - it is an abstract of your entire project, from beginning to end.


• This must be followed by the Introduction that gives an overview of what the reader should expect in the sections that follow. An additional brief paragraph could describe how you chose your project.


• Each section, such as the Abstract and Introduction, should be headed by a left-adjusted bolded section title on its own line.


• The remainder of your paper must be divided into titled sections, and possibly subsections, each with its own bolded title. Typical divisions would be your topic, goals, methods, results, evaluation, and discussion. You should try to use more informative section titles than those.


• The Discussion section is not the same as Evaluation. Evaluation is an analysis of your results. The Discussion section puts the whole paper together as a coherent whole, relating all the parts. It is typically one single-spaced page.


• The page counts and wording will vary from section to section, and are summarized below, e.g., "Total: Seven pages of text, 3500 words, plus six figures and seven references. You'll have to figure out how this word count is distributed across your sections.


• Bibliographic references in the text should be in the form of bracketed numbers, e.g., "[3]", with the numbered references at the end of your paper on a separate page. URLs are secondary - for the most part you'll be referring to published papers and books. The references at the end of your textbook are a good guide to how to format them. Don't invent an odd or inferior format when standard scholarly styles are already out there. When you do reference URLs, you must also include the title and author of the page referred to, as well as the date you last accessed the page. This has become conventional, since many web pages disappear after a while, unlike books and scholarly articles. (Many issues of scholarly journals are available on-line, often going back many decades, well before the existence of the world-wide-web.)


• At least four or your cited works must be discussed - you cannot simply include them without discussion. In the past some students have only included web page references. As I've already emphasized, this is not acceptable, because in virtually every case you can (and must) go to Google Scholar, CiteSeer, ACM, or IEEE and you will find scholarly articles about the systems and concepts you are writing about. Finding, referencing, and discussing scholarly papers and books is a requirement. Websites/pages can be included in addition to your required references, but only if they are necessary and only if they are of adequate quality.


• Be sure to use the technical terminology that your textbook or your references use, wherever it is applicable. Don't write in a casual, conversational, non-technical style. Your textbook is not written in that way and you shouldn't either.


• At then end of your paper, include a Summary section, one which assumes that the reader has read through your paper. This only needs to be one or two paragraphs.

Here are some additional notes based on what I have seen in the projects you have handed in previous AI courses, and in other courses I've taught.

• Too many references are to web pages.


• The references are rarely cited in the report, and even more rarely discussed, merely mentioned. It's easy to find some references and list them. But you must tell your reader what they were about and what you learned from them that helped your project.


• There is little use of the technical terms and concepts from the course textbook. It would be hard to guess from some of the project reports I've received that the student had even taken an AI course. The reports were too often written in a casual style.


• Please tabulate your results as tables or graphs Don't just bury the results in paragraphs of writing. In your text, if you have a set of three or four or more items listed, don't run them together in one long sentence. Instead, break them out into a collection of items in a bulleted list


• Every figure and table in your paper should have a caption at least two sentences in length.


• There are a number of other aspects of the reports that didn't fulfill the requirements I laid out. But often, some basic editing and restructuring solved these problems.


• Get each version of your project handed in on time. That will assure you get full credit for it, and more importantly, it will allow me to give you feedback which will help you improve the following versions and the final project report.


• Grammar and spelling matter. Write in as crisp and clear manner as you can manage. Spell check your work. The clarity of your writing can easily be checked by letting a friend or two read through your reports before you hand them in.


• Finally, you should realize that your project grade will be maximized if you pay careful attention to the many points I've raised.

You must discuss material from two of the books on the course book list

You are required to include substantial discussions of material from at least two of the books on the course book list. Give a full citation to the book as well as the numbers of the various pages or sets of pages from which you draw your material.

Find and discuss other literature related to your project HERE

Use our library's online research resources to find papers from journals or conference proceedings. Two other good sources, on the web, are Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.com/, and Citeseer ^x, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/, as long as the papers you use from those appeared in high-quality publications or are highly cited. You can also request a Consortium Card from our library and then use other libraries such as MIT and BU http://www.lib.neu.edu/services/borrowing/apply_blc_card/.

Choosing your project topic

You will choose a topic in the manner described on this project suggestions page.

How to write. Your audience

When writing, you should always write for an "audience", the people whom you expect to be reading what you write. Your audience should not be me, Professor Futrelle. Instead, you should imagine that your audience consists of other students in the class. You can assume they've been learning the course material, but you can't assume that they know the details of your project topic or the concepts in your topic in any depth.

Everything you write and hand in should be checked for sense, form, grammar, and spelling before you hand it in. This includes your Assignments, not just your Project.

How to write. All good writing requires extensive rewriting

There is an old and important adage about writing: There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting. Keep this in mind for all writing you do, whether it's for your project or just for email. I rarely just type in email text and send it. I normally look it over and keep making changes. Sometimes I print out an email and edit it before I type in the final edits and send it.

Programming in your projects

You can find some (slightly outdated) discussion of programming in the Spring 2006 project pages. There is extensive AI code available on the AIMA site and on the Norvig PAIP site and in his PAIP book.

Project stages

Initial project plan - Due Wednesday, January 28^th

Your initial plan should briefly summarize what you have chosen to work on. It should list one or two papers you have found so far, with a brief note as to their relevance, e.g., you could paste in the abstract from each paper. Please hand in hardcopies of the papers you've found. It is very inefficient for me to download and read them for both of my classes, but easy for each of you individually. Your initial project plan should consist of between one and two pages of (single-spaced) text, plus additional pages for diagrams or code samples.

Your initial plan should have two components: topic content, and how you plan to pursue your project. By topic content, I mean some writing that describes the field and topic you have chosen. Think of this portion as something another student might read to learn something about the field and topic you'll be focusing on. By pursuing your project, I mean that you could include your plans to learn to use an AI application, what data you might be working with, what algorithms you might be developing or using, further research you will do into the literature of the topic, etc.

If your project involves programming or the use of tools such as such as WEKA or Protégé, you should discuss how you think you might develop your system design and do any coding needed for your project. Pay careful attention to evaluation for any programming project or tools you use - how you will demonstrate that your system succeeds in meeting its goal.

Mid-semester Project Report - Due Monday, March 16^th

This will be an extensive report. The report should have a substantial amount of content, a written report of at least three or four pages (single spaced). If you are writing code include some commented excerpts. Include excerpts of data files you use in your programming, or machine learning, if that applies.

A major goal of the mid-semester report is to help you get enough done at this point in the course so problems won't pile up later and so you won't delay working on it until near the end of the course like some people do (and usually regret!). The grade and comments that you get back will help guide you toward your final project.

I give all students feedback on their initial project reports, as well as discussing the reports in class, indicating the various strengths and weaknesses I find. From these discussions you should have a reasonable idea of what you need to do for your interim report. But to help you, I have added a guidelines / requirements list below. You needn't follow the specific guidelines below, but if you deviate, it should be in the direction of having more and better material to hand in than in the list below.

• At least three pages for your report, single-spaced.
• A minimum or two papers should be referenced and discussed. This is in addition to the requirement that you discuss material from two of the books on the course booklist.
• Your discussion should convince your reader that you have read and understood the relevance of the material to your project.
• You will notice that essentially every paper you read about your topic has one or more figures in it. I strongly urge you to include at least one relevant figure in your interim report. If you get the figure from elsewhere, you can include the original caption, but you must write your own additional caption for it. Your figure(s) could be screen shots of any application showing what it looks like when used in your work with it. That is, it should be your screen shot, not one you got from a site.
• Include examples of your results, in addition to your three pages.
• Spell-check your report.
• Edit your report so it isn't too wordy. You might end up writing five or ten pages, but those pages might be better if edited down closer to the three page minimum.
• Your assumed audience should be another student in the class or another CS student.

Optional final project draft version - hand in by Monday, March 30^th

This should be a draft version of your final project. The intent is to give me a chance to give you some final bits of advice to help assure that your final project will be in good shape. This is to help you. Handing in this draft is not required.

Final project - due Friday, April 17th 4PM, by email or to my office or lab WVH 450/460 WVH or 202 WVH

This will be your final project. Hand in at the class or email by the end of the day, 11:59pm. The guidelines above for the mid-semester report apply, with the following differences:

• The amount of material you hand in should be greater, e.g., five to ten pages minimum for your report.
• You should include and discuss more references, four or a few more, in addition to the two books from the book list.
• Most figure captions that students write are too short. The captions in AIMA vary from one line to many. Your captions should never be shorter than three lines long. Make this your goal: A person should be able to look through your project report, and by looking only at the figures and captions, get a reasonable idea of what your project is about.

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