1. 2011 Group Project2 Goal: Groups of 3 students (preferred, 2 and 4 is also okay; students pick a topic, work 3 weeks on the topic, and prepare a 5-8-page report (or webpage) and give a 10-15 minute presentation. Has to be something with machine learning A project you are interested in works better Using software packages OK, particularly comparing tools and algorithms is fine Reviewing and comparing 2 papers that present different algorithm/approaches for the same problems is fine Applications of Machine Learning is fine Theory problem OK Project ends: April 16/18, 2011 (Student presentations: April 14+19)

2. Example Project Themes Finding scene lighting from face images Predicting Musical Scores http://kddcup.yahoo.com/#http://kddcup.yahoo.com/# Use of machine learning in urban driving http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDqzyd7fDRc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDqzyd7fDRc Customer and product clustering for recommender systems Comparing Naïve Bayes and Neural nets for text classification Adaptation in a virtual animal world using reinforcement learning Predicting success of major league baseball teams Differences between ML and MAP estimators Compare algorithm X and Y Paper review and comparison Predicting the future success/failure of graduate students Survey on Multi-dimensional scaling techniques and tools Remark: Projects that do programming/use ML-tools are fine, but other projects are equally welcome.

3. Other Comments Project2 Report should have 4-6 pages for groups of size 2, 5-7 pages for groups of size 3, single spaced with an 11-point or 12-point font (if you have other deliverables instead, discuss it with Chun-sheng); if you produces something else during the project (e.g. a program) submit it as an appendix. Follow the traditional organization when writing the report: short abstract, introduction, main part (can be several sections), conclusion, references. Reference all sources you used in your final report including your own publications (  not doing so is cheating!!!) Groups of 2 give a 10-12 minute presentation and larger groups give a 13- 15 minute presentation. Each group member should participate in the presentation. Practice your presentation; make sure you stay within the time limits. Introduce your topic clearly; be aware of the fact that students in the course might not know much about the topic you are working on. Quality of presentations counts 30% towards the overall grade.