CS785 - Spring 2016 - Final project guidelines
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Note: It is advisable that you hand in to my mailbox by Jun 24 a
brief (1 or 2 paragraph) project proposal, outlining your proposed 
project topic. I will comment and hand this back to you.
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For the final project, each student should select a topic that is relevant
to the course. Focus on a problem being addressed by current researchers.
Include a description of current research on the problem 
and an analysis of this research. Your analysis should comment both on
strong points of the research and areas where the research falls short.
You may choose to focus on one main researcher or to compare and contrast
various approaches. If focusing on only one researcher, include reference to 
related work, demonstrating some understanding of the background.

Once you have described existing work, move forward to include some 
original ideas on how to advance research on the problem, how to extend or 
improve on the current approaches. Try to specify your ideas with some
precision, rather than simply stating a problem that is worth addressing.
I am looking for some depth of understanding and some creativity to emerge,
here. Include some general conclusions at the end of the project.

The size of the project is not fixed. Aiming for about 10 (500-word) pages
seems reasonable. A project which is too long will be difficult
for someone to survive reading. A project which is too short
will have problems convincing the marker that sufficient time,
energy and thought was devoted to its cause.

It is expected that each student will spend time reading
research papers, understanding the research, analyzing the
research to see the benefits and drawbacks, glancing at
related work (for instance, other papers cited in the bibliography
of the paper(s) in focus), thinking of some new ideas.

If the focus of the project is a complex theory, some effort
will be devoted to summarizing the research and presenting
it in the project. Nonetheless, there must still be some
time spent in the project describing the value of the work
and its relationship to previous work in the field. Each student
must decide the appropriate amount of effort and space to devote
to describing the solution(s), analyzing the solution(s) and
proposing new ideas.

The topic selected must fall under the general area of intelligent computer
interfaces. Any of the subtopics we have addressed in the course (in lectures
or suggested by the papers proposed for presentation) can be used as the
starting point for finding a project topic. The list of papers available for
presentation in the course is intentionally quite broad in scope, to provide
you with some insight into a nice range of interesting relevant subtopics.
You are not required to use one of these papers as a starting point;
any topic that you feel is relevant to the course can be proposed.
Many of you may choose to find a topic that is of use towards your
own thesis research. I will explicitly approve your topic, if you submit
a project proposal by the June 24 deadline.
Make sure that your topic is brought into the context of artificial
intelligence and that the papers you read and analyze come from this field.

If you prefer, it is possible to do an implementation-oriented final
project. For this option, the report will include details on
the implementation itself: the design decisions made, some annotated sample
output, etc. But, there must also be some component which
discusses the significance of the work, mentioning some related
work, which convinces me that the student has also done some
deeper thinking/reading for the project. In some sense, the description
of the implementation takes the place of the original work component of
the project and this will likely be a fairly lengthy piece, but there
still needs to be some discussion of the problem that motivated
the creation of the system.