In this 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, examples, or applications involving such systems.
In particular, you can discuss reasonably short code snippets
for CLIPS or Jess, and explain the particular techniques that are used.
The easiest way to find information is probably to use the Internet.
A few good starting points for general topics 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 a few years ago),
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,
"Intelligence" at 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.
For the code snippets, you can try the Web sites of the respective text books,
or do a Google search for CLIPS of Jess programs. Of course you can also
take a problem that you find especially interesting, and write your own code.
Puzzles and brain teasers that you find in magazines or books are sometimes
good candidates for that.
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 findings. This material will be made available
to the whole class either via Blackboard, or through a Web repository
that is under development as a Senior Project this quarter.
The presentation should last about ten to fiteen minutes.
Your written documentation should be the equivalent
of about two to three printed pages.
Time Table
The deadlines for this assignment 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
(except for presentations during Week 1 or 2)
Presentation and documentation prepared
one week before presentation
You can use my laptop or your own for the presentation, or
print transparencies. If you give your presentation in the lab,
you can use one of the machines there.
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. You need to post the final version of
your presentation on Blackboard
the night before you're scheduled.
Internet Access: Network access from my laptop is not
reliable in the classroom, and does not work in the lab.
In the lab, we can use a PC or a Sun workstation with 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 the presentation
10
Delivery of presentation
15
Presentation Hints
For those of you who don't have much experience giving presentations,
follow the link for a few suggestions.