Poster Presentations

Most computer science conferences include a poster session where presenters stand beside large-format posters that summarize research results. Conference attendees then have the opportunity to sip tasty beverages while circulating among the posters and talking to the presenters about their work.

The goal of our poster session is to give you a chance to research some area of AI that interests you, and to present what you have learned to the rest of the class. I'll be flexible about the topics of the posters. Possibilities include:

• An AI application area.
• An AI Algorithm that we did not get a chance to cover in detail.
• An AI project that you are proposing - possibly with the first steps completed.

Your topic should be narrow enough for you to present it in some depth. Your poster should be visually appealing, include appropriate figures, and be technically accurate. Your poster should include properly formatted references to peer-reviewed papers.

You will get a deeper understanding of your topic if you dive in and actually write some code or try out some existing tools. A small amount of extra credit will be available to posters that include original results.

There will be four deadlines for this project:

• Deadline 1: Topic proposal + preliminary bibliography.
• Deadline 2: Annotated bibliography.
• Deadline 3: Electronic poster submission.
• Deadline 4: Poster presentation.

Topic Proposal

For this deadline you should submit a short (1-2 paragraph) description of your topic, along with at least three representative references. I suggest that you follow the The AAAI Press Reference Style in formatting your references.

Annotated Bibliography

Your annotated bibliography must include at least six peer-reviewed conference or journal papers. At least three of these papers must contain a reference to some other paper in your bibliography. At least three of your papers must have been published within the last four years. For each paper, you must provide complete bibliographic information as well as a brief summary of the paper. The summary should describe the key results, note any references to other papers in your bibliography, and explain the connection to those referenced papers.

Poster

Exact formatting requirements TBD.

Finding Papers

Here are some possible starting points for finding high quality papers.

Google Scholar is probably your best starting point. A good way to get started is do some keyword searches related to your topic and take a look at the most highly cited papers that appear relevant. There are many low-quality or uninteresting papers out there. Citation counts provide a good mechanism for focusing attention on noteworthy papers. Once you find an interesting paper you can follow forward and backward citations to get a deeper understanding of the topic.

Conference publications are the main avenue for disseminating research results in computer science. I've highlighted a few of the top conferences in several AI areas below. Except where noted, the proceedings for these conferences should be available on-line.

First-tier Conferences:

• General AI:
  • Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
  • International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
  • Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI)
• Machine Learning:
  • International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
  • International Conference on Learning Representations
  • Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)
• Natural Language Processing:
  • Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
• Computer Vision:
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
• Robotics:
  • International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

First-tier Journals

• Artificial Intelligence Journal
• Journal of Machine Learning Research

A Note on arXiv.org

The arXiv.org web site provides a popular avenue for quickly disseminating research results that may not have undergone a formal process of peer review. Sometimes arXiv papers are under review for a journal or conference, sometimes they are pre-publication versions of papers that have since appeared in a peer-reviewed publication, sometimes they are more like informal white papers that are not intended for formal peer review.

The arXiv is great, but for the purposes of this project you should only use arXiv papers if they have actually appeared in a peer review publication. This information will often appear in the "comments" section of a paper's arXiv page. The reference information you provide must include the full publication information.

Reading Research Papers

Reading a research paper is not like reading a novel or even a textbook. Research papers are usually written under the assumption that the audience will be other researchers in the same field. In addition, papers are often written under strict page limits that restrict amount of background information the authors can provide. The keys to making sense of research papers are patience and perseverance. I suggest the following steps.

• Start by reading the abstract, the introduction and the conclusion. At this point the goal is to figure out the big-picture claims that the authors are making. What have they accomplished? Why does it matter? At this stage you may determine that the paper is not worth reading. If so, move on to a different paper.

• Next, read the whole paper all the way through. Twice. Read carefully, but don't get bogged down by equations or details. Get a sense for the overall organization of the paper and the main points that are being made in each section. Underline or highlight points that seem particularly important or difficult to understand.
• Finally, go back and try to puzzle out the parts of the paper that were unclear on the first few read-throughs. You will probably find that there are terms or concepts that are important, but are not explained in the paper. The Internet/Wikipedia may be helpful. You may also find that the authors are assuming that you are familiar with some other paper or body of work. You obviously won't be able to read every cited paper (and all of the papers cited in those papers), but some extra reading may be unavoidable.

By the time you finish, you should understand the key points that are being made in the paper. You may not understand every sentence and every equation, but you should know what you don't know, and be in a position to discuss it.

Grading

The grade for this project will be calculated as follows:

Proposal	10%
Bibliography	20%
Poster Presentation	60%
Your Evaluations	10%
Possible Extra Credit for Original Results	5%

Your poster presentation will be evaluated by me, as well as by other members of the class, and possibly other members of the department. You will be evaluated both on the poster itself, and on your ability to present the contents.

Acknowledgments

This project is based on a similar project developed by George Ferguson at the University of Rochester.