CPE/CSC 480-F09 Artificial Intelligence 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/, and a commercial publication, the PC AI magazine at http://www.pcai.com/ (I'm not sure if this is still being published).

I will make some of the presentations given by students in previous quarters available through Blackboard. You can also browse a collection of snippets from Web pages that I put on a Google notebook at AI Nuggets Google Notebook. Recently, Google abandoned these notebooks, and I switched over to Evernote; see AI Nuggets Evernote Notebook. You may also find some ideas at a related notebook, KM Nuggets (Evernote). The emphasis here is on Knowledge Management (KM): helping people to utilize more effectively knowledge that is represented on computers. Unfortunately, I've been having problems syncing recent additions from my desktop version to the Evernote Web version, but hopefully they will appear soon.

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.

A list with the current choice of topics and the dates for the presentations will be made available through Blackboard.

Deliverables

You need select a topic in the first two weeks of the quarter, and post a brief description (about 100-200 words long) of your presentation on Blackboard. The presentation should last about ten minutes, and you can use Powerpoint slides or similar. The presentations will be scheduled during class or lab times. Usually the classroom as well as the lab will have a computer projector. If necessary, portable projectors can be obtained from Media Services.

Time Table and Signing Up for Presentations

You can sign up for a presentation date on a form on Blackboard. 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. The selection of a topic and presentation date should be made during the first two weeks of the quarter. After that, I may assign dates, and if necessary, topics, to students. The deadlines for the deliverables depend on your selected or assigned presentation date, and are listed in the table below.

If you already have a topic, and are ready to do a presentation during the first or second week, you can earn extra credit on this assignment.

Issue	Deadline
Topic selected and approved, and abstract posted on Blackboard	Tuesday of Week 3 (unless your presentation is earlier)
Draft of presentation (e.g. outline) posted on Blackboard	one week before presentation
Final version of presentation posted on Blackboard	two days before presentation

Grading Criteria

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

Computer-Based Presentations

Feel free to use PowerPoint or some other presentation software. For presentations scheduled during class time, you can bring your own laptop, or borrow one from Media Services. If you're scheduled to do your presentation in the lab, you can use the computer there.

Presentation Hints

If you don't have much experience giving presentations, follow this link to some presentation hints.