If you are taking 254 for four units of credit, you must do a project in addition to giving a presentation.  The project should be at the frontier of current research, but need not necessarily move the frontier forward.  Replicating the results of an innovative recent paper would be a good project, for example.  Projects must be closely inspired by one or two specific recent high quality papers.

Projects will preferably have an experimental component, but "crass empiricism" is to be avoided.  As much as possible, you should use a high-level programming environment such as Matlab, and/or you should reuse existing software such as Weka.  If you do not have access to sufficient computing resources for the projects, contact the instructor immediately.  For compute-intensive work, you may use the computers provided by the Active Web project.

Hopefully, most projects will be of high enough quality to be submitted to NIPS 2002, for which the deadline is July 1.

The schedule for the projects is as follows.  You are expected to spend about ten hours per week on the 254 project, i.e. about 100 hours in total.  If you are spending much less time, you are not putting in the effort of a full-time student and getting a good grade will be difficult.  If you are spending much more time, you should think more about efficiency and prioritization.

(1) On Monday April 8, you should hand in a project proposal.  This should explain explicitly and clearly what you will do.  In particular, the proposal should include:

• a list of four to six questions to be answered during the project and discussed in the report
• a list of four to six milestones, with a deadline for achieving each milestone
• if the project is experimental, which existing software you will use directly or build upon
• if the project is experimental, precisely which datasets you will use and where you can obtain them quickly
• a list of four to six recent papers that are  closely related that you will build on, with full bibliographic data.

(2) You should sign up for a 30 minute meeting on Thursday April 11 to discuss your proposal in person.

(3) On Monday April 15, you should hand in a revised and extended project proposal.  This must take into account comments received from the instructor and other sources.  It should be three to four pages long when formatted following the NIPS instructions.   Sign up for a 30 minute meeting on Thursday April 18 to discuss your revised proposal.

(4) On Monday May 13, you should hand in a progress report.  This should be two to three pages long in NIPS format.   Sign up for a 30 minute meeting on Thursday May 16 to discuss your progress.

(5) On Monday May 27, you should hand in a complete,draft of your project report.  The report should be polished and should resemble as closely as possible a good submission for a machine learning conference.  You should follow the NIPS instructions and these guidelines.  Read, think carefully about, and follow all the principles of good writing in the "Nuts and Bolts" guide to rhetoric by Michael Harvey.

Sign up for a 30 minute meeting on Thursday May 30 to discuss your draft.

(6) On Monday June 10, you should hand in the final version of your project report.  This will be graded following these grading criteria.  Perfect academic honesty is required.

The final version of your report should be a PDF file in NIPS format that is under one megabyte.  Avoid these common formatting mistakes.  To maximize the readability of your paper, and to minimize the size of the PDF file, make sure that you use only standard Postscript fonts.  Use the command \usepackage{pslatex} in LaTeX to achieve this.  Also provide an ascii abstract of your report that follows the guidelines here and is 150 to 200 words long.

While doing the project, remember that winning at research is similar to winning in many other fields of endeavor.
 

Build on an idea that has been successful in previous work. Make the description of your work understandable, attractive, and memorable; pick catchy names. Keep the work simple.  Let the basic ideas shine through. More papers = more ways to have impact and be noticed.

It Takes Soup And a Dream     (Newsweek, March 26, 2001, page 8.) Susan Runkle isn't just M'm! M'm! Good! She's the M'm! M'm! Best! Her Polynesian pork chops have been named a new Campbell's classic, an honor worth $20,000. Peri asked Runkle to dish on how to win a cooking contest: 1. Polynesian pork doesn't just happen. Work backward by building on a taste you enjoy. (Runkle started with the tangy pork-pineapple combo.) 2. Pick a catchy name. "Use alliteration: red raspberry... something." 3. Keep it simple. Skip recipes "six pages long with chipotle chiles." 4. More recipes = more ways to win. "I sent in a pasta dish, a beef casserole--I call it pepper-pot beef--a Tuscan chicken, a Mexican pizza and a chicken potpie.  Husband's not too keen on fish."

The first phase of the project is especially important.  In this phase, some important tasks include:

• formulating clear, sensible hypotheses to test,
• finding useful training sets and test sets,
• surveying closely related recent papers, and
• selecting and obtaining existing software, and developing new software.