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CPE/CSC 480 Artificial Intelligence Fall 2004
Points 25
Deadline Ongoing

CPE/CSC 480 Assignment 1: AI Nuggets

In this assignment, your task is to find interesting concepts, methods, or applications dealing with Artificial Intelligence, and give a short presentation of about ten minutes to your classmates.

Choice of Topics

The easiest way to find information is probably to use the Internet; a few good starting points are the Web sites of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/current.html, the Web sites of AI journals such as the IEEE Computer Society's "Intelligent Systems" journal at http://www.computer.org/intelligent/, its counterpart from the Association of Computing Machinery, "http://www.acm.org/sigart/int/ (this journal ceased publication in 2001), and a commercial publication, the PC AI magazine at http://www.pcai.com/pcai. I will also make some of the presentations given by students in previous quarters available through Blackboard. If you have problems identifying a topic, you can also talk to me, or see Wayne Montgomery at the library, who is the librarian in charge of Computer Science topics.

Deliverables

You need to present your topic to your classmates, and prepare a Web page with a brief description of your finding. Your material has to be made available to class on Blackboard. If you want to, you can also distribute a handout, e.g. a printout of your Web page or copies of PowerPoint slides. The presentation should last about ten minutes; your written documentation should be about the equivalent of two to three printed pages.

Time Table

The due date listed for the first assignment in the class schedule refers to the selection of a presentation date only. After that, the deadlines depend on your selected or assigned presentation date, and are listed in the table below. You can sign up for a presentation date on a sheet that I will pass around during the first few weeks of the quarter. Initially, only those students who have already selected a topic will be allowed to pick a date, so it will be beneficial to choose a topic early.

Issue Deadline
Topic selected and approved three weeks before presentation
Draft of presentation prepared two weeks before presentation
Final version of presentation and documentation prepared one week before presentation
Material posted on Blackboard one week before presentation

Grading Criteria

The table below indicates the grading criteria I intend to use for the evaluation of this homework.

Criterion Points
Draft version of presentation and documentation 5
Final version of presentation and documentation 5
Delivery of presentation 15

Computer-Based Presentations

Feel free to use PowerPoint or some other presentation software. You can use my Macintosh iBook, but there are a few practical constraints. It doesn't have a floppy disk drive, so you need to put the file with the presentation on Blackboard at the latest the day before you give the presentation. You can also put the presentation on a CD-ROM or a USB flash drive and bring it to class, but on a few occasions there have been problems reading files from these media. I have the a recent version, PowerPoint X on my iBook, and most presentations work without problems. If you're using sounds, images, movie clips or other advanced features, make sure that they are either directly included in the main file, or that the auxiliary files are also submitted. If you want to be on the safe side, you can also bring your own laptop, or borrow one from Media Services.

Presentation Hints

For those of you who don't have much experience giving presentations, follow this link to some presentation hints.



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