CPE/CSC 480-F06 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/, 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 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.

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 is available from the link below:

• AI Nuggets Presentation Schedule

Deliverables

You need to present your topic to your classmates,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.

Time Table

You can sign up for a presentation date on a sheet that I will pass around during the first two 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. 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.

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. You can use my Macintosh PowerBook, 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 recent version of PowerPoint 2004, and Keynote 1 on my laptop, and most presentations work without problems. Sometimes fonts are missing, but this is usually only an appearance problem. 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. If you do your presentation in the lab, you can use the computer there.

Presentation Hints

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