Goals

The main goal of the project is to allow you to study more in-depth machine learning algorithms of your choice. A secondary goal is to help you develop your research skills (reviewing research literature, formulating questions, deciding on a theoretical or empirical approach to answer them, writing up you findings and presenting them to your peers). Ideally, the project topic you choose should be related to your research interests.

There are three main categories of projects:

• Applying machine learning to interesting problem domains, thereby allowing you to gain in-depth experience with specific algorithms.
• Studying machine learning algorithms not covered in class.
• Investigating theoretical issues.

Ideally, the projects would be individual. However, if the topic is very big, teams of two people would be accepted too. If you choose to team up, there should be a clear delimitation between the work of that each person does. Both students should turn in separate write-ups and each should present a part of the work.

I strongly encourage you to perform some experiments as part of your project, in order to gain practical experience with machine learning algorithms. Many algorithms are available free from universities and research labs, so you would not have to code them. The resources web page should help you find both papers and software as needed.

Project themes

If you are already have a research topic in mind, feel free to propose it. Otherwise, you can choose a topic from the list which will be posted below in October. If no topic suits your interest, please make an appointment to discuss alternatives.

Format and dates

The first step is to complete a project proposal, which is due by Tuesday, November 5. This should be a short document (a couple of paragraphs) stating the title of your intended project, the reason why you are interested in this topic, a rough plan (e.g. what machine learning algorithms you would use, where you would get the data), and a list of 5 papers that you think will be relevant to your topic. You do not have to read the papers before the proposal, nor do you have to include them in your final bibliography, if they end up not being relevant. The main purpose of this document is to inform me of your intentions, so I can give you feedback on the scope of the work.

The project itself will include two major components:

• Project report.
  The report should be approximately 10 pages long (this requirement is just to get you oriented; do not take it as a hard restriction). The format should be similar to the research papers we read during the semester. It should contain the following information:
  • A description of the topic and why you were interested in it
  • A review of related literature; this should include at least 5 papers relevant to your topic. If you want help seeking such papers, let me know.
  • One or more specific questions that you wanted to investigate
  • The methodology you decided to follow (e.g. theory or experiments, what kind of experiments, etc.)
  • An analysis of your findings
  • Conclusion and possible future work directions
  The due date for the report is Friday, De, by 5pm.

• Project presentation.
  Given the high enrollement, we will decide on the exact format of the presentations later.