Points |
20 |
Deadline |
ongoing |
CSC 481 Winter 2002 Assignment 4: KB Nuggets
In this first assignment, your task is to find interesting concepts,
methods, or applications dealing with Knowledge-Based Systems,
and present them to your class mates.
Choice of Topics
You can choose your own topic in the area of Knowledge-Based Systems,
or Expert Systems. Your topic should concentrate on concepts, methods,
systems, or applications involving such systems.
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,
Ken Laws' Computist newsletter
http://www.computists.com/archives/cw11toc.html
(which unfortunately ceased publication last summer),
and 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,
" HREF="http://sigart.acm.org/intelligence/">http://sigart.acm.org/intelligence/ (this link seems to have problems),
and a commercial publication, the PC AI magazine at
http://www.pcai.com/pcai.
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. A handout, e.g. a printout
of your Web page or copies of PowerPoint slides, should accompany
your presentation, and be distributed to class. 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.
Issue |
Deadline |
Topic selected and approved |
two weeks before presentation |
Presentation, handout and Web pages prepared |
one week before presentation |
You can use my or your own laptop for the presentation, or
print transparencies. You can also borrow a laptop from
Media Services in the basement of building 3 and 10.
Unfortunately there are some restrictions
with the setup we have:
- Operating System: My laptop is a Macintosh iBook.
It usually runs PowerPoint presentations created on
Windows systems fine, but some esoteric fonts may
not work. It doesn't have a floppy disk drive,
so you need to send me your presentation via email,
or bring it on a CD-ROM.
- Internet Access: I'm having difficulties
with the network access in the classroom and in the lab.
In the lab, we can use a Sun workstation for Internet
access, and switch the projector.
Grading Criteria
The table below indicates the grading criteria I intend to use for
the evaluation of this homework.
Criterion |
Points |
Final version of presentation and handout, Web pages |
10 |
Delivery of presentation |
10 |
Presentation Hints
For those of you who don't have much experience giving presentations,
here are a few pointers.
Preparation
Especially if you are unsure about your topic, it is better to start
working on it as early as possible, and discuss it with me if you have
doubts. Of course you can wait until the day before the due date,
and then pull an allnighter, but the outcome of this strategy
may be a little risky.
Structure
There are many ways of arranging the information to be conveyed in a
presentation, and you can use your own experience and judgement for it.
A relatively "safe" way of doing it is to use a structure similar to
my lectures:
- Overview: Introduce the main parts of the presentation.
- Introduction: Describe why this problem is important (or at least
interesting), and how it relates to the general topic of the class.
If necessary, give some background information on issues the audience
may not be familiar with.
- Description of the System, Concept, or Method:
This is the technical part of the presentation, where you discuss
the design of the system, or the main ideas of the concept or method.
- Implementation: What are the tools and techniques used for
the implementation, and which problems needed to be overcome.
- Experimentation and Evaluation: What experiments were performed
to demonstrate that the system works, and how was its performance
evaluated.
- Conclusions: Recapitulate the most important points of your
presentation (the ones you want your audience to remember)
- References: List the sources for your information
For a short presentation such as this one, you may have to address
some of the above issues very briefly, or skip them entirely.
You can also include a short demonstration, if this is feasible.
If you use transparencies or PowerPoint, a rough guideline is
to calculate two to three minutes for each presentation, so
if your presentation has 20 slides, you're going overboard.
Practice
Especially if you don't have much experience with this, you may
be nervous about standing in front of an entire class, and talking
about a topic you don't really know well.
Being well prepared generally helps with keeping nerves in check,
but you can also give one or more trial presentations to friends
(maybe your team mates are willing to help here).
This is especially helpful for timing issues. Most often,
it will take you longer to give the presentation than you
initially think.
Readability
Use a large font, and don't try to squeeze too much onto one transparency.
In PowerPoint, you should reserve fonts of less than about 20 point
(it also depends on the font type) to things that are not critical for your
audience to read. If you're trying to economize by simply copying
your Web pages onto transparencies, most likely you'll end up
with too much stuff on one slide, in a font that is far too small.
In most cases, it is better to list important aspects as phrases
("bullet points"), rather than formulating it in complete sentences.
In our field, most presenters speak without a script, explaining
issues shown on the transparency or the screen. Except for
short, important statements like definitions, don't read
the text written on your transparency to the audience:
They can read it faster than you pronounce it, and it
quickly gets boring. If you're afraid that you're too nervous
to speak freely, you can read from a prepared script, but
then your transparencies should only contain the most
important issues in short phrases, not the text you're
reading.
The Big Moment
Now that you're well prepared, almost nothing can go wrong.
Of course, you still may be a little nervous, and then you
can't get your file displayed on the computer projector.
The backup transparencies you've prepared are in your car
in the parking lot way at the other end of campus.
The idea to save paper by making two-sided handouts worked
nicely, except that the same page is printed on both sides.
And by now you're sweating so profusely that the ink on your
cheat sheet starts to dissolve.
Well, don't worry, almost all of the above has happened to
me, although not necessarily during the same presentation.
It's Over
Before you realize it, your ten minutes are over, and
you've even been able to utter a few additional sentences
in response to all the smart questions that came up
after your presentation. Now you can sit back, relax,
and enoy all those other interesting presentations to come.
There's that minor issue of grades for the presentation,
but, first of all, it's over, and of course the only
question is whether you'll get all twenty points, or only
nineteen ;-)
Web pages Copyright © 1996-2002,
Franz J. Kurfess,
Email: fkurfess@csc.calpoly.edu
Last modified: Wed Feb 6 08:44:43 PST 2002