You are asked to carry out an original research project related to the course content. We envision several types of projects:

• Try out an existing algorithm in a new setting.
• Invent a new algorithm or network architecture.
• Analyze a phenomenon that occurs during learning.

Collaboration: You should form teams of 2-3 students. Your final report should list the contributions of each team member.

Due Dates

Project Proposal: due Fri, Feb 28, at 1pm

Final Report: due Fri, Apr 18, at 1pm

Project Proposal

Each team will write a short (1-2 page) research project proposal. It should include a description of a minimum viable project, some nice-to-haves if time allows, and a short review of related work. You don’t have to do what your project proposal says — the point of the proposal is mainly to have a plan and to make it easy for us to give you feedback.

You will submit your proposal on MarkUs.

Final Report

And the end of class you’ll hand in a project report, in the format of a machine learning workshop paper (e.g. NeurIPS). We recommend the report be about 4-6 pages plus references, but we do not enforce any minimum or maximum length.

You will submit your final report through MarkUs. You must also submit the code necessary to reproduce your experiments.

You are welcome to use GenAI chatbots to help with the project. However, you must attribute any part of the work done by GenAI. Along with your submission, you must include transcripts of all chatbot conversations related to the project.

Marking

80% of the marks will be given for meeting the requirements of the project and for the quality of the project proposal, presentation, and final report. (A mark of 80% corresponds to B+/A-.) This includes:

1. Abstract (5 points) that summarizes the main idea of the project and its contributions.
   1. Should be understandable to anyone in the course
   2. You don’t need to say everything you did, just what the main idea is and one or two takeaways.
2. Introduction (10 points) that states the problem being solved and why we might want to solve it.
3. Figure or diagram (10 points) that shows the overall idea. The idea is to make your paper more accessible, especially to readers who are starting by skimming your paper.