Practicum in Artificial Intelligence

CS4701  - Fall 2011 - Hod Lipson
Department of Computer Science, Cornell University

Time and Place

Phillips Hall 219, 03:35PM - 04:25PM - Only meets Aug 30 and for individual presentations thereafter

• First meeting: Tuesday, Aug 30
• Preliminary proposals (Hardcopy + 5-minute presentation): Sep 13, in class (sign up for a presentation time slot and post your PowerPoint presentation on your project page on the CS4701 Wiki)
• Final proposals due: Friday Sep 17, Drop off hardcopies in Upson 360
• Weekly progress update by email due to your TA every Tuesday (your assigned TA is listed on the CS4700 Wiki)
• Code review # 1 (Hardcopy report + progress meeting): Tue Oct 4 (coordinate a meeting time with your TA to review code, and meet Lipson in class Sign up for a time slot)
• Code review # 2 (Hardcopy report + meeting + demo): Tue Nov 1 (coordinate a meeting time with your TA, and meet Lipson in class. Sign up for a time slot)
• Final presentations with demo, Tue Nov 29  (schedule a presentation time slot and post your PowerPoint presentation on your project page on the CS4700 Wiki)
• Final project reports due in hardcopy (Upson 360) and CMS, Dec 2. Upload a copy to the wiki as well.

This is a course parallel to CS 4700 - Foundations of AI (register separately, not required)

Project topics and teaming

Competition: The competition project is a well defined project where all participant submit entries that compete with each other. The competition this year will be a game of modified Chinese Checkers. You will be given sample code that plays random moves and you will have to improve it.

Students are encouraged to team in groups of 3 students.  Once you have identified your team and topic please registered them on the CS4700 Wiki and select a proposal presentation date. A TA will be assigned to your team, and you should stay in touch with that TA throughout the semester.

Course Staff and office hours

Instructor: Hod Lipson
Head TA: Yue Gao

Name	email	Office hours & location
Hod Lipson	Hod.lipson@cornell.edu	Tuesday + Thursday, 1-4pm, Upson 242
Jason Yosinski	yosinski@cs.cornell.edu	Thursday 8 - 10, Upson 328
Nikos Karampatziakis	nk@cs.cornell.edu	Thursday 6 - 8, Upson 328
Yue Gao	ygao@cs.cornell.edu	Wednesday 3 - 5, Upson 328

Mailing List

For questions email cs4700ta-l "at" lists.cs.cornell.edu. (Note: Remove the extra spaces). The list is set to mail all the TA's and Prof. Lipson -- you will get the best response time by using this facility, and all the TA's will know the question you asked and the answers you receive. Anything you mail here will only go to the instructors and the TAs, not the entire class.

You can also join the Google group cs4701-cornell@googlegroups.com to receive and post announcements relating to this class. Anything you post here will go to the entire Practicum class.

Prerequisites

You may take CS4701 as a supplement to CS4700. CS4700 is a co-requisite for CS4701.

Syllabus

The goal of this practicum is to allow students the opportunity to apply concepts and techniques learned in CS 4700 - Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. The main assignment for CS4701 is a course project. Students will work in groups (probably pairs, three if well justified by scope). A project proposal is required, an oral presentation, weekly progress meetings with the TA and a final presentation, including demo, on the last week of classes.   A separate project handout with project suggestions, details, and due dates regarding the project proposal, and final project write-up will be made available from the course home page.

Grading

This is a 2-credit course. Grades will be determined based on proposal quality and final report, as well as participation in weekly meetings.

• 10%: Initial proposal and presentation
• 10%: Weekly progress emails
• 10%: Code Review 1
• 10%: Code Review 2
• 60%: Final project report and presentation

Academic Integrity

This course follows the Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity. Each student in this course is expected to abide by the Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity. Any work submitted by a team in this course for academic credit is expected to be the team's own work. Collaboration is between teams is allowed at a conceptual design level, but you cannot copy all or part of another student's code. Uses of existing open-source code is allowed only with TAs approval, in which case the team's performance will be judged on their added value beyond the functionality of the basic code. Violations of the rules (e.g. cheating, copying, non-approved collaborations or code use) will not be tolerated.