Project

During the semester you will conduct research and write a paper on some AI topic. Since this is a PhD-level course, I strongly encourage you to work with your advisor on this and I am happy to participate in those conversations. Ideally, this project will become a part of your dissertation, or at least your qualifier.

Scope

Of course it's unreasonable to expect you to finish a conference-quality submission from start to finish in one semester, but if you are already working on something, I encourage you to use it as your semester project. I also recommend that you submit your immature work to a workshop, which is an excellent way to get helpful intermediate feedback from the broader research community. If you define your project early enough, it's reasonable to finish a workshop-quality publication during the semester. See, for example, AAAI 2025 Workshops, NeurIPS 2024 Workshops.

Deliverables

You will produce the following deliverables, due at appropriate points during the semester (see the schedule):

Project proposal. Describe your problem, why it's interesting, why it's hard. Describe any data sets, test sets or test environments you will use. For examples of community test sets/environments, see ImageNet Challenge, AAMAS 2025 Competitions, AIIDE StarCraft AI Competition.

(Intermediate) Results. This is a checkpoint to ensure you are on track and an opportunity to get feedback with enough time to act on that feedback. Any code that's a part of your research should be working. For example, if your project involves an analysis of results, you should have working code that produces the results and code to analyze it (producing confusion matrices, ROC curves, etc.). If your project involves interactive agents, you should have a working agent interacting properly in some test environment and code that produces learning curves, comparisons with competing agents, etc.

Finished research paper. A finished research paper ready to submit for publication. Of course, you may continue to work on it after this class is over.

You will write your proposal, results and finished research paper in $L A T E X$ using the style files of the venue to which you intend to submit your work, or AAAI style files if you don't (yet) have a target venue. You should keep your code, data, and paper up to date in a GitHub or GitLab repository to which you grant me access, if your repository is private. It is cutomary to have a separate GitHub repository with the code that produces the results in your paper, but not necessarily the paper source (.tex files). Some conferences require the "results" repository. I should have access to both repositories. My GitHub username is dr-cs and my GitLab username is drcs.