Project Proposal Guidelines

Overview

The purpose of the team project is to investigate and showcase the applicability of symbolic and neural AI approaches. You’ll collaborate with a peer to propose, design, document, and showcase your investigation. Project artifacts include a project proposal, project design, codebase, a final report, and a demo (see Course Syllabus).

The project proposal addresses the following aspects of the team project:

  1. What type of AI system will the team investigate?

  2. What AI system has the team selected from publicly available sources to exemplify the type of system under investigation?

  3. What content knowledge (theories and concepts) are needed to understand what the AI system does and how it works?

  4. What practical knowledge: tools, platforms, APIs, libraries, and data sets are needed to develop the AI system?

  5. What risks might be posed by the AI system development and use? How are the risks mitigated? Consider the following issues:

    1. Safety and security
    2. Protection of data privacy
    3. Protection against algorithmic discrimination
    4. Transparency and explanation

  6. References: What trustworthy and publicly available materials and resources inform and guide the project work of the team?

Team Contributions

Team members collaborate to:

  • Explore and select an AI system example of the assigned AI system type using trustworthy and publicly available materials and resources (to address #1 and #2 above)

  • Assemble relevant references from the assigned readings, other references made available in the course notes, Wikipedia, and other adequate sources (to address #6 above)

    • Set up a team project Zotero libray
    • Add the references to the team project Zotero library
    • List the references in Section 6 of the proposal.

Individual Contributions

Team members decide to equitably divide the task of writing sections 3, 4, and 5.

  • Determine the team member who’s the lead author and the team member who’s the reviewer for the following questions:

    • Member 1: Questions 3 and 5.1 and 5.2

    • Member 2: Questions 4 and 5.3 and 5.4

  • Include the names and roles along with the text of the question in the proposal.

Development

The project proposal can be developed through direct, real-time collaboration between team members.

  • On the main branch, create docs directory. In this folder, create PROPOSAL.md .

  • Team members collaborate to write their sections and review the collaborator’s sections according to the planned writing assignments.

  • When development is done, main branch Is pushed to the remote.

Organization and Formatting

  • At the top of the proposal have a title section that includes:

    • Title of the project, authors, and date.

    • Use ### (level 3) Markdown for the title

    • Normal text for authrs and date.

  • Structure the proposal document in 6 sections, corresponding to the aspects that the proposal addresses.

  • The names of the section headings should be suggestive of what the section is about.

  • Use #### (level 4) Markdown for the section headings.

  • Use paragraph style in writing the section content.

  • The length of the proposal in PDF form is 3-4 pages.

Submission

  • PROPOSAL.md in docs directory

  • PDF version of the proposal submitted by each team member in Canvas.

Optional: Feature-branch Development Workflow

  • The team lead creates a docs directory with PROPOSAL.md file in it on the main branch

  • Each contributor creates a branch based off main, in which they draft the sections assigned to them.

    • For example, Mihaela gets started with mihaela-1-proposal. Her partner, Ann, does her work on ann-1-proposal.

  • During drafting, the contributor commits changes to their branch

  • When done, the contributor does the following:

    • Push their OWN branch to the remote

      • For example: push origin mihaela-1-proposal

      • This assumes that the origin is the location of the course remote repo

    • In GitHub, the team member who pushed their branch

      • Open a pull request to ask that their branch be “pulled” into main branch

      • Assign the review of the request to the other team member (e.g., Ann)

  • When the reviewer approves the request, the contributor does the merging of their branch into main in GitHub

  • There might be merging conflicts if another team member has already done the merging of their changes. In that case, the conflicts are resolved through real-time, direct communication between the authors (in GitHub or locally)