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This course requires a presentation on a topic related to intelligent agents. The presentation is accompanied by a term paper on the same topic.
You can select your own topic, but it must be pre-approved by the instructor. A formal topic proposal must be submitted via Blackboard.
Your topic proposal must include:
When you submit it to the Blackboard discussion forum, please create a new thread that includes your presentation date and the topic.
The overall timeline for the presentation and paper is as follows:
Activity | Date |
Topic selection | Week 3 |
Topic proposal | Week 5 |
Reviewer feedback to topic proposal | Week 6 |
Draft version paper | Week 7 |
Reviewer feedback to draft version | Week 8 |
Final version paper | Week 9 |
Reviewer feedback to final version | Week 10 |
The documents are due at the end of the day on Thursday of the week indicated in the table above.
Since the presentation dates are different for individual students, due dates for presentation material will vary: A draft version of the presentation is due one week before the presentation, with feedback by the reviewers due two days before the presentation. If you prefer to meet person to person to go over the presentation instead of giving feedback in writing, you can do this. If so, please post a brief note on the respective Blackboard thread with an overview of the issues that the speaker and the reviewers discussed. The final version of the presentation material is due when you give your presentation.
Late submission are subject to a penalty of 10% per business day.
The paper should follow the requirements for submissions to the ACM Crossroads student magazine; see their Writers' Guide for more details. I expect papers to be 4,000-6,000 words long, which corresponds to roughly 5-10 pages (depending on formatting).
Your paper should contain the information listed below. The structure describe below originally was intended for CSC 300 papers, and you can modify it according to your topic and needs.
In addition to giving a presentation and writing a term paper, you are required to act as peer reviewer or commentator on two papers written by other students, and on their presentations. In this capacity, your task is to make sure that the material is presented in such a way that it is as easy as possible for readers to benefit from the paper. This includes, but is not restricted to, the following:
The issues above are typically addressed when professionals review articles submitted to academic journals, and are usually followed by a recommendation to publish the article, reject it, or to ask the author for modifications. To this end, the evaluators fill out a review form, and return it to the editor of the journal, who then makes the final decision about publication, rejection, or a request for modification of the paper.
The identity of the reviewers is usually only known to the editor; otherwise, authors who are unhappy with the evaluation of their paper may be tempted to retribute against the reviewers. Some conferences and journals also use "double-blind" reviews, where the identities of the authors as well as those of the reviewers are hidden. In order to keep the administrative overhead low, we will conduct open reviews, where the authors know the identity of the reviewer.
Specifically for this class, you need to complete the peer review form, and submit it to the respective BlackBoard discussion forum (as a reply to the message with the posting of the paper). As an alternative, you can also use a review form provided by Ian Parberry; see http://www.eng.unt.edu/~ian/guides/form.html It is somewhat more elaborate, and intended mostly for theoretical computer science papers. Please note that requires LaTeX if you want to do a computer-based version.
As a reviewer, you also need to formulate at least two follow-up questions that can serve as a starting point for further discussions after the presentation.
The presentation and paper together contribute 40% to the overall grade. The breakup of the score is detailed in the table below. The total score for paper and presentation is 100.
Activity | Score |
Topic proposal | 10 |
Presentation | 20 |
Slides | 20 |
Draft version paper | 20 |
Final version paper | 20 |
Reviews of other papers | 10 |
For the evaluation of student presentations, I am using a form based on a spreadsheet. A file with this form (and a few others) is available as 580-Feedback.xls.
A tentative version of the evaluation form I will use for grading the papers is available here: 580-Paper-Evaluation.txt.
Please note that while the peer reviews may influence my impression of the paper, the numerical values assigned by the reviewer will not be used directly for the calculation of the assignment score.
Here is a list of brief, but essential hints:
Additional hints can be found at the following Web sites:
You can find examples of student papers at the CPSR and ACM Crossroads Web pages. Of particular interest may be submissions by former Cal Poly students, such as Eric Rall's paper on Shrinkwrap licenses, and Rom Yatziv's paper on Spyware: Do You Know Who's Watching You?. Note: I just saw that the papers are not available anymore, but there's still a listing of the Essay Contest Winners.
There are some articles in the ACM Crossroads magazine, (which contains only submissions by students) that are relevant to this class, although some of them are a little dated by now:
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