The objective of the final project is to explore topics in decision making under uncertainty in greater depth than is permitted in class. The choice of topic is up to you, but it should be related to the general themes of the course. As part of the project you should:
Your topic may be related to your graduate research or another class project (so long as permission is granted by the instructor of your other class); however, you must make the relationship to your other work clear in your proposal and final paper and describe how you have extended this research for this class.
Your final project may be done in any programming language, and you may use any libraries or software available to you. If you have difficulty finding an appropriate topic, feel free to talk with the course staff during office hours or post to Piazza. Example problem domains can be found here:
As all research projects will be graded with the same standard regardless of the number of people in the group, you are encouraged to work in groups of 2-3 with everyone in the group taking the same number of units (unless prior approval from the instructor is given). You can still choose to work individually if you want to.
When working in groups, please clearly detail the contributions of the individual group members.
You are welcome to refer to past project titles.
Due date: October 30th at 1159pm
Clearly describe the problem to be solved, the approach to be taken, and how you will measure success. Please reference any prior work that you plan to build upon. If you submit early, then we will try to give you feedback early.
proposal.pdfThe proposal is limited to two pages and should be submitted to Canvas in PDF format. The proposal is worth 5% of your grade. Please choose and join of the 150 groups with your group mates (found in People -> Groups -> Choose Final Project Group X) and then submit your assignment as per normal. Note that every group member has to join the group individually!
Due date: December 9th at 11:59pm
Write a 4-6 page paper describing your research. It should follow the typical conference style with an abstract, introduction, etc. State what the problem you are trying to solve, introduce your approach, and review the relevant literature. The experiments should be described in sufficient detail that someone with a reasonable background in the area could reproduce your results. Show your results and discuss the conclusions that can be drawn. You can use the AAAI, AIAA, NIPS, or IEEE paper templates (the LaTeX version looks better, but Word will be accepted)—or you can use the template of another conference of your choice.
If you end up using LaTeX, I like using the biblatex package to manage references, pgfplots for plotting data, and tikz for drawing figures—but you are free to use whatever you want.
The final grade will based on the following criteria:
Students who are registered for 4 units are expected to spend 30 additional hours on the research component and will be graded according to this expectation. The paper that is produced should be ready for submission to a peer-reviewed conference.
final.pdfThe final paper should be submitted to Canvas in PDF format. The paper is worth 20% of your grade.
Due date: December 11th at 11:59 pm
Peer review is an important part of science and engineering. Understanding the review process will make you a better writer. As part of this class, you will be randomly assigned two student papers to peer review in the spirit of a real conference or journal article review. The task of the referee is outlined in this article by Alan Jay Smith. Although you will not be making recommendations for or against publication, you will need to answer the questions listed in Section 4 of Smith’s article.
Each person has to do 2 reviews. Each of your reviews will be 1 page. You will be graded according to the quality and constructiveness of your review. Your reviews will be provided anonymously to the authors, so please do not include your name in your review.
review1.pdf and review2.pdfThe peer reviews should be submitted to Canvas in PDF format. The reviews are worth 5% of your grade.