In this part of the class work, 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/, the Web sites of AI journals such as the IEEE Computer Society's "Intelligent Systems" journal at http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/intelligentsystems, and a commercial publication, the PC AI magazine at http://www.pcai.com/ (this magazine ceased publication a few years ago, but the Web site still has interesting material).
I will make some of the presentations given by students in previous quarters available through PolyLearn. You can also browse a collection of snippets from Web pages that I put on the AI Nuggets Evernote Notebook. You may also find some ideas at a related notebook, KM Nuggets. The emphasis in the latter is on Knowledge Management (KM): helping people to utilize more effectively knowledge that is represented on computers.
If you have problems identifying a topic, you can also talk to me, or see David Beales at the library, who is the librarian in charge of Computer Science topics.
A list with the topics selected so far and the dates for the presentations will be made available through PolyLearn.
Deliverables
You need select a topic in the first two weeks of the quarter, and post a proposal. Your proposal should contain the following information:
- an abstract (a brief description of about 100-200 words),
- an outline in bulleted list form, with at least ten items arranged in at least two levels,
- at least five references for sources you used, or links to additional information; if you use links, add information like title, author, organization, publication date - "naked" URLs are not sufficient.
Time Table and Signing Up for Presentations
If you have a topic for your AI Nugget presentation, you can sign up for it on the AI Nuggets page; you can also view the presentations scheduled so far there. 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 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.
- Topic selected and approved, and abstract posted (with links on the AI Nuggets page): Tuesday of Week 3 (unless your presentation is earlier)
- Draft of presentation (e.g. outline) posted: one week before presentation
- Final version of presentation posted: two days before presentation
Grading Criteria
The distribution of points I intend to use for the evaluation of this assignment is as follows; the items in parentheses indicate the typical point distribution for that part:
- Topic proposal: 20% (Title 5, Abstract 10, References 5)
- Final version of presentation slides or notes: 30% (Content: 20, Structure 5, Appearance 5)
- Delivery of presentation: 50% (Topic Knowledge 20, AI Relevance 10, Topic Difficulty 10, Presentation Structure 2, Supporting Evidence 2, Presentation Delivery 2, Audience Interest 2, Timing and Length 2)
If you don't have much experience giving presentations, follow this link to some presentation hints.