Project Information

The project is an opportunity for you to delve more deeply into a topic that you find especially interesting. Your project can be theoretical, experimental, or practical in nature. For example, you may wish to further study the properties of one of the network architectures discussed in class, by performing a series of detailed experiments and analyzing the results. Or you might attempt to duplicate and then extend the results of one of the research papers that we read. Or you might decide to apply a particular architecture or learning algorithm to some practical problem from the real world.

If you wish, you may work with a partner. In this case, both members of the team will receive the same project grade, and will be expected to contribute equal amounts of work to the implementation of the code and to the writeup and presentation of the results. Each member of the team should email me separately with his or her assessment of the work-breakdown of the project.

Due by 5:00pm Monday, December 16 (NO EXTENSIONS!)

Requirements

Projects will be presented orally in class during the last week of the semester (December 9-11). You will not be required to have finished everything by the time you present, but you will be expected to have completed a significant portion of the work by then. Your presentation should follow this format:

  1. Describe the problem on which you worked as succinctly as possible.
  2. Briefly mention prior work and background.
  3. Describe your approach.
  4. Describe results, positive and negative, including any demonstrations.
  5. Present possibilities for future work.

Your writeup should be in the form of a Web site. The final updates to your Web site should be done by 5:00pm Monday, December 16, which is when I will begin reviewing the sites. Please email me the URL of your Web site by the deadline. The site should be organized so that the following are linked on a single page, in this order:

  1. Problem statement.
  2. Experimental design and approach.
  3. Results and conclusions.
  4. References.
  5. Code directory.
  6. Any Web-based class presentations you've made.

Your grade on the project will be determined by the quality of your oral presentation and writeup, the comprehensiveness and degree to which you explored competing approaches, and the overall depth of your investigations.

Some suggestions for possible projects

Here are some ideas for possible projects. However, you should feel free to think up your own, or to modify the suggestions given below in whatever way interests you the most.

Links to earlier projects

Projects from Fall 2001

Projects from Fall 2000