Project for Machine Learning (308-761A)

Fall 2001


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:

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 below. If no topic suits your interest, please make an appointment to discuss alternatives.

Proposed topics:

Format and dates

The first step is to complete a project proposal, which is due in class on Tuesday, November 5. This should be a short document (max. 2 pages) 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:

I would like to make the projects and presentations available from the class web page, with your permission of course.
Prof. Doina PRECUP
Last modified: Fri Oct 26 16:07:33 EDT 2001