BBM406: Fundamentals of Machine Learning

Spring 2021

Course Project

An integral part of the course is the class project (35% of the grade), which gives students a chance to apply the algorithms discussed in class to a research oriented project. This semester the theme is Art and Machine Learning.

Some example project titles are as follows:

Sample Research Papers on this years project theme

  1. Ahmed Elgammal, Yan Kang, Milko Den Leeuw. Picasso, Matisse, or a Fake? Automated Analysis of Drawings at the Stroke Level for Attribution and Authentication. AAAI, 2018
  2. Amy Zhao, Guha Balakrishnan, Kathleen M. Lewis, Frédo Durand, John V. Guttag, Adrian V. Dalca. Painting Many Pasts: Synthesizing Time Lapse Videos of Paintings. CVPR, 2020
  3. Rajat Agarwal, Katharina Kann. Acrostic Poem Generation. EMNLP, 2020
  4. Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Wesley Cheung, William Broniec, Mark O. Riedl. Automated Storytelling via Causal, Commonsense Plot Ordering. AAAI, 2021

Resources

In your projects, you may use a dataset available on the web or collect your own data. However, if you choose the latter option, you must you must keep in mind that data collection can be fun and exciting, but it is also time-consuming.

Please also keep in mind that complexity of your project topic will be taken into consideration while grading.

Software and Libraries

You are encouraged to learn and use the following machine learning and deep learning frameworks in your projects. Links to some useful NLP tools are also provided.

Deliverables

In preparing your progress and final project reports, you should use the provided LaTeX template and submit them electronically in PDF format. Late submissions will be penalized.

Collaboration Policy

Each project should be done in groups of 3 students. Of course, there may be some exceptions, depending on the enrollment. Note that students without a team will be randomly assigned to one project group.

Grading

Project Proposal

Each project group should submit a half page project proposal on their specific project idea by March 31, 2021. The proposal should provide

Blog posts/GitHub commits/Meetings with TAs

Each project group should maintain a blog sharing their steady progress, ideas, and experiments, and they must write at least one blog post per week (excluding exam weeks). Moreover, they will regularly meet with TAs to discuss their progress and get feedback. Each group should maintain a GitHub repository for their project (must be viewable to the TAs and instructor). The frequency of your commits to GitHub will also be graded.

Progress Report

Due: May 5, 2021 (11:59pm)

Each project group should submit a project progress report by May 5, 2021. The report should be 3-4 pages and should describe the following points as clearly as possible:

Project Presentations

Due: May 26, 2021 (in class)

Each project group will have ~8 mins to present their work in class. The suggested outline for the presentations are as follows:

In addition to classroom presentations, each group should also prepare an engaging video presentation of their work using online tools such as PowToon, moovly or GoAnimate. The deadline is May 28, 2021.

Final Report

Due: May 30, 2021 (11:59pm)

As the last deliverable of the course project, each group is expected to submit a project report prepared using the style files provided in the course web page. The report should be 6-8 pages and should be structured as a research paper. It will be graded based on clarity of presentation and technical content. A typical organization of a report might follow: