Course project

All students in the class will write a “mini-paper” as a final project, which can be empirical, theoretical, or both. The project should take one of the following two forms:

  • Research: Present progress your group made on a problem relevant to the course. Your report should adopt the structure of a research paper, though it is not required to reach the standard for academic publishing. Clearly explain the problem, previous research, the positioning of your results within this context, and support all your assertions with evidence and (if applicable) proofs.
  • Survey: Choose between 2 and 4 papers discussed in class. For each paper:
    1. Summarize a paper that the paper covered in class cites. Answer the question: how does the paper covered in class build on the older paper?
    2. Summarize a paper that cites the paper covered in class. Answer the question: how does the more recent paper build on the paper covered in class? (To find papers that cite the paper covered in class, check out Google scholar.)
    3. Now, imagine you’re a researcher who is working on a new project in this area. Propose an imaginary follow-up project not just based on the paper covered in class, but only possible due to the existence and success of the paper covered in class.1 The papers you choose for (1) and (2) should not have been covered in class.

Format

Students should write up the results in the NeurIPS conference format.

Working in groups

  • Students are welcome to work in groups on the final project.
  • Groups should include at most three students if it’s a research project and at most two students if it’s a survey project (except with special permission).
  • I will expect a group of two students to put twice as much work into the final project than for a solo-authored project, and similarly for groups of three.
  • Students in groups are required to include a “contributions” paragraph in their paper that concretely lists each author’s contributions.
  • The paper length for a final project write-up is:
    • 3 if solo-authored,
    • 5 if there are two authors, and
    • 7 if there are three authors not including references or the contributions paragraph.

Milestones

  • May 1: Each group will submit a short progress report of 1-2 pages. Describe your project and partial progress.
  • June 5: Students will present their final project during class.
  • June 12: Each group will submit their final report.

Grading

Grading will be out of 45 points, with the following breakdown:

  • Research
    • Progress report: 10 points.
    • Writing: 10 points; your final paper should be readable and complete, and it should clearly contextualize your results within prior research.
    • Novelty: 15 points; your project should propose something new (either a new application, method, or perspective).
    • Final presentation: 10 points; your final project presentation should be clear and provide a solid picture of what you did.
  • Survey
    • Progress report: 10 points.
    • Writing: 10 points; your final paper should be readable and complete. The connections to prior and subsequent research should be clear.
    • Novelty: 15 points; for each paper, the third component of the survey should propose something new (either a new application, method, or perspective).
    • Final presentation: 10 points; your final project presentation should be clear and provide a solid picture of what you did.

  1. These tasks are directly inspired by a course design by Alec Jacobson and Colin Raffel [link]. ↩