[an error occurred while processing this directive] CSC 580 Intelligent Agents Winter 2004

CSC 580Intelligent AgentsWinter 2004 Presentation on Intelligent Agents

In this assignment, your task is to find interesting concepts, methods, or applications dealing with Intelligent Agents, and present them to your class mates. The basic idea is similar to the AI and KB Nuggets in the 480/481 classes, but since this is a graduate class, the requirements are higher.

Choice of Topics

You can choose your own topic in the area of Intelligent Agents. Your topic should concentrate on concepts, methods, systems, examples, or applications involving such systems. You can also investigate tools or development environments for agents, but in this case there should be no significant overlap with the first homework assignment.

The easiest way to find information is probably to use the Internet. The American Association of Artificial Intelligence http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/current.html has a section on agents on their Web site. The IEEE Computer Society's "Intelligent Systems" journal at http://www.computer.org/intelligent/, and a commercial publication, the PC AI magazine at http://www.pcai.com/pcai also have articles or sometimes special issues on agents. Another good resource for this research is the CiteSeer repository of Computer Science papers at http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/. This Web site, hosted by NEC's research lab in Princeton, NJ, contains a cross-indexed collection of research papers and articles, and provides a helpful analysis of the similarity of papers based on criteria such as an overlap in phrases and sentences, or the listing of references in the bibliographies. It is especially useful if you already have an idea for your topic, but you are looking for additional material.

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.

You need to present your topic to your classmates, and prepare a document that accompanies the presentation. 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 thirty to fourty minutes.

Topic Proposal

You topic proposal should include the following items:

Paper Format

The paper should follow the requirements for submissions to the ACM Crossroads student magazine. I also encourage you to actually submit the paper to the Crossroads magazine. A paper written by Ching Kang Cheng, who finished his thesis last year, was recently accepted and should appear soon.

Structure

You paper should contain the information listed below, but you don't have to use the exact sections and titles.

Peer Reviews

Two other students will serve as commentators on the presentation, and will help with the editing of the paper. The material for your presentation (typically PowerPoint slides or something similar) must be made available through BlackBoard one week before the presentation is given.

The Role of Peer Reviewers

In addition to giving a presentation and writing a term paper, you are required to act as peer reviewer or commentator on two papers written by other students, and on their presentations. In this capacity, your task is to make sure that the material is presented in such a way that it is as easy as possible for readers to benefit from the paper. This includes, but is not restricted to the following:

The issues above are typically addressed when professionals review articles submitted to academic journals, and are usually followed by a recommendation to publish the article, reject it, or to ask the author for modifications. To this end, the evaluators fill out a review form, and return it to the editor of the journal, who then makes the final decision about publication, rejection, or a request for modification of the paper. The identity of the reviewers is usually only known to the editor; otherwise, authors who are unhappy with the evaluation of their paper may be tempted to retribute against the reviewers.

As a guideline for the review, you can use the peer review form. Please submit your feedback to the respective BlackBoard discussion forum in response to the proposal, the presentation, and the paper. In order to keep the administrative overhead low, we will conduct open reviews, where the authors know the identity of the reviewer. You also need to formulate at least two follow-up questions that can serve as a starting point for further discussion after the presentation.

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 Week 3
Proposal submitted Week 5(Deadline Assignment 2)
Presentation submitted one week before presentation
Paper submitted Week 9 (Deadline Assignment 4)

Presentation

Follow this link for a table with the evaluation criteria that I will use for the presentations.

Presentation Hints

For those of you who don't have much experience giving presentations, follow the link for a few suggestions.

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:

Grading Criteria

The table below indicates the grading criteria I intend to use for the evaluation of this homework.
Criterion Points
Proposal 10
Delivery of presentation 15
Paper 15
Peer Reviews 10

Acknowledgement: Parts of this assignment description are based on what I believe was originally put together by John Dalbey, with modifications by Clark Turner and Lori Fisher for their CSC 300 classes. Adopted with further modifications by Franz J. Kurfess in Winter 2003 for CSC 300, and in Winter 2004 for CPE 580.


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Franz Kurfess