CS 540, Spring 2008: Final Paper
Guidelines and Suggestions
Due: May 13, 2008 by noon

To give you some practice in following standard publishing guidelines, you will be using the paper format required by the national AI conference (AAAI). The format is available at: MS Word and Latex templates are available.

If you submit your paper electronically, please use ps or pdf formats (not source!). Also, look them over before submitting; we have occasionally found that conversions produce odd formatting.

Your final project report should conform to the requirements of the conference, up to a point. AAAI limits to six pages, although they allow authors to purchase up to two extra pages for the proceedings. So, my guidelines are that the paper be at least five pages and no more than eight pages in length.

I will otherwise be following standard conference guidelines. Any paper over eight pages will be returned without review (meaning you receive a 0). Your paper will be graded on the quality of the presentation (e.g., coherence, structure and thought) as well as on the quality of the project (e.g., scholarship, careful research practice, contribution, etc.). Negative results are fine; no results are not.

This paper should have roughly the following composition:

1. Problem description: what were you trying to do; this should describe the problem addressed by the project. Use your original one page descriptions as a starting point for this part.
2. Previous work: survey what approaches have been adopted before. It may be a quick reference to the AI techniques selected for the project or it could reference papers on the problem or on the previous approaches taken to the problem. It depends on the composition of the project; if it extends previous work, then reference what it extends; if it is novel, then reference techniques that motivated the design. References should be from publications rather than web sites; the exception to that is if you downloaded code or problems from a website.
3. Approach taken: what did you do. Describe your project: what AI techniques are used by it, why you picked these techinques, how was the project structured, who did what, what sort of data was supplied (example problems for learning systems, prior models for non-learners), what results were expected. Code samples must be short.
4. Analysis: How well did your project do: as expected, better or worse. Why did it perform as it did? What worked and what did not? Were there any surprises?
5. Future Work. Conclusions. What did you learn? What would you do in addition or differently?

I expect some substantive thought and discussion in the last two sections of the paper. I view that part as the most important: What did you learn?

The grading criteria will be:

• Written Presentation
  • Organization
  • Style, readability
• Project Quality
  • Significance/level of difficulty
  • Appropriate citations and acknowledgment of use of existing code or ideas
  • Motivation (hypotheses, why this problem and approach) and conclusions (what you learned, what can reasonably be concluded from program and evaluation)
  • Technically sound
  • Program demonstration, evaluation, and analysis of results.
  • Creativity, level of understanding and learning demonstrated.