Projects

Option 1: Experimental project. Use of available software on standard datasets to evaluate and compare Machine Learning algorithms and parameter settings.

Option 2: Implementation project. Students will implement an intelligent agent for a web-mining or text-mining task.

Use of code off the Web is strongly encouraged (with proper referencing). Effective use of available code (with explanation of the enhancements) will be highly rewarded.

The implementation should be accompanied by a design document. The major points of the design should be well thought out and clearly described in the design document. If no implementation is given, it should be possible for a competent programmer to produce a working program (given sufficient time) without having to make any major new design decisions. Projects with working implementations will be rated higher than projects without.

The length of a design paper (without an implementation) should be approximately 15 pages (1.5-spaced at point size 11) times the number of persons in the group.

If an implementation is produced, then the length of the report can be much shorter (about 5 pages), and it should include the description of the problem, a brief overview of the design, how to use the program, and a sample of experimental results. The code should be self-documented, and a brief demonstration is expected.

Option 3: An in-depth discussion paper. It should be based on papers not covered in class. The discussion paper will include three (or more) related research papers on the same topic, and it should be a critical review of the readings, pointing out advantages and disadvantages, comparisons, and suggestions for further research. The level of sophistication of the paper should obviously be much higher than that required for the weekly reading summaries. If the number of persons in the group are > 1, it will be expected that more than the minimum number (3) of research papers will be reviewed.

The length of a discussion paper should be approximately 15 pages (1.5-spaced at point size 11) times the number of persons in the group.

Presentation: For all options, there will be an out-of-class presentation of the projects at the end of the class.