Miniprojects
(Last updated Friday, Dec. 4 -- see revised deadline!)

Purpose
  This final assignment is an opportunity for you to (1) put together some of the ideas you have learned in the course and apply them,  and/or (2) investigate more deeply a topic in artificial intelligence that we have introduced in the course.

Topics
  Here is a list of suggested topics.  I've chosen these so that they relate to topics we've introduced and extend them in ways that will involve thoughtful analysis of AI challenges.

Case Based Reasoning

1. Case Based Information Retrieval allows users to
pose WWW queries in a particular structured form.
The system then consults a database of cases to provide
a starting query for the user's problem.  It custom-tailoreds
the query to better meet the user's needs.


Natural Language Understanding


1. Conversational program uses natural language to
query a base of documents.  Each document can be
represented as a list of keywords.

2. Homework coach that knows about what assignment are,
what deadlines are, and is able to provide a certain
amount of help.

3. Time-frame understanding -- a program that analyzes
stories and figures out all the temporal relationships
among the events, setting up a representation for this
information.  The vocabulary and recognized event types
can be limited in order to focus project attention on
the temporal analysis.

Image Understanding

1. A program that analyzes the geometrical structure of
a map of the UW campus.

2. A program that analyzes the scanned images of antique
art prints and builds a geometric representation of each
etched stroke.

3. A program that learns how to classify images into a set
of categories.  The learning procedure might use a neural
network, where the input values are either the raw pixel
values themselves or some appropriately computed features of
the image.  The set of categories might be something like

{ images of people, other images } or
{ cartoons, photographs }.

The set could certainly contain more than two categories,

if you wish.


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 Other AI topics are possible but you must get permission
for any other topic from the instructor.

Groups
  You may work alone or in groups of up to three people.

Schedule
  Nov. 23:  Consider topics and possible groupings
  Nov. 25:  Each person post a short message in your current groups with the heading "MY INTERESTS" indicating what topic(s) interest you.  This is non-committal but serves to inform everybody else of your current thinking with respect to the miniproject.
  (Over the holiday)  Think about the project and what you would like to accomplish.
  Dec. 2: Post project plan -- topic and list of names of people in the group.  Explain what you expect to accomplish.
  Dec. 4: Status post 1.
  Dec. 7. Status post 2.
  Dec. 9. Status post 3.
  Dec. 11 (Final exam)
  Dec. 15. Final project reports (posts) due at 5:00 PM.

  Reports
  Final projects should be turned in on the web using a header such as OUR PROJECT REPORT or MY PROJECT REPORT.  Your report should contain certain items.