CS886 - Spring 2024 - Final project guidelines
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Note: It is advisable that you hand in by July 2 a
very brief (1 or 2 paragraphs only) project proposal, outlining your proposed
project topic. I will comment and send this back to you.
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For the final project, each student should select a topic that is relevant
to the course. Focus on a problem being addressed by current researchers.
Include a description of current research on the problem
and an analysis of this research. Your analysis should comment both on
strong points of the research and areas where the research falls short.
You may choose to focus on one main researcher or to compare and contrast
various approaches. If focusing on only one researcher, include reference to
related work, demonstrating some understanding of the background.

Once you have described existing work, move forward to include some
original ideas on how to advance research on the problem, how to extend or
improve on the current approaches. Try to specify your ideas with some
precision, rather than simply stating a problem that is worth addressing.
I am looking for some depth of understanding and some creativity to emerge,
here. Include some general conclusions at the end of the project.

The size of the project is not fixed. Aiming for about 10 (500-word) pages
seems reasonable. A project which is too long will be difficult
for someone to survive reading. A project which is too short
will have problems convincing the marker that sufficient time,
energy and thought was devoted to its cause.

It is expected that each student will spend time reading
research papers, understanding the research, analyzing the
research to see the benefits and drawbacks, glancing at
related work (for instance, other papers cited in the bibliography
of the paper(s) in focus), thinking of some new ideas.
You will need to decide how much time to spend on each required element.

The topic selected must fall under the general one of the three
topic areas of the course: trust modeling, explanation or social networks,
with some element of artificial intelligence in the proposed solution(s).
Selecting a topic which examines both trust or explanation and social networks
is certainly acceptable (and if doing so, you may choose either to begin with).
Many of you may choose to find a topic that is of use towards your own thesis.
Make sure that your topic is brought into the context of artificial
intelligence and that the papers you read and analyze come primarily
from this field.

If you prefer, it is possible to do an implementation-oriented final
project. For this option, the report will include details on
the implementation itself: the design decisions made, some annotated sample
output, etc. But, there must also be some component which
discusses the significance of the work, mentioning some related
work, which convinces me that the student has also done some
deeper thinking/reading for the project. In some sense, the description
of the implementation takes the place of the original work component of
the project and this will likely be a fairly lengthy piece, but there
still needs to be some discussion of the problem that motivated
the creation of the system.

If you use a smaller font and narrow margins, do pay attention to
the intended length of essay (about 5000 words if this were text only).