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:

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:
  1. Overview: Introduce the main parts of the presentation.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Implementation: What are the tools and techniques used for the implementation, and which problems needed to be overcome.
  5. Experimentation and Evaluation: What experiments were performed to demonstrate that the system works, and how was its performance evaluated.
  6. Conclusions: Recapitulate the most important points of your presentation (the ones you want your audience to remember)
  7. 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