Overview

For the final, you and a group of up to three people will work on a substantive independent machine learning project. You will make both a final poster, to present your research to others in the class and the community during a showcase, and a final artifact.

Milestone One: Project Proposal with Pilot

In Lab 8, you will propose a potential final project idea which will be submitted with your group to Gradescope by Friday Nov 7 at 11:59PM. We will have an in person (as mentioned on the course schedule) where will we discuss your project and feedback will be provided (hopefully during the class time on Tuesday Nov 7).

You will be asked to do a followup/concrete first step by Friday, Nov 21, as mentioned on the course schedule by adding a markdown document to your groups github detailing what you did/found.

Milestone Two: Project Preliminary Presentation

On Thursday Dec 4 your group will present the results of your project in the form of a draft of your final poster. A template for your poster is provided below. You should plan to guide people through your poster with a brief (roughly 5 minute) pitch. Your pitch should address the following:

  • What is your research question or goal?
  • How are you operationalizing your question/goal?
  • What are your methods?
  • What are your results?
  • What do your results mean?

These questions map to the Introduction, Experimental setup, Results, and Summary+Conclusion portions of the poster. Please discuss with me if you have any questions. You should add your poster (as a pdf) to the folder linked below by the start of class on Thursday Dec 4.

Phase Three: Final Poster Presentation

In the final phase of your project your group will produce a poster that you will present (as a group). Your poster will be presented in person and should be printed using Colgate’s free poster printing facilities (linked below). You may be creative with the design of your poster (that is, it doesn’t have to strictly follow the template). The poster should convey:

  • What is your goal?
  • What are your methods?
  • What are your results?
  • What do the results mean?
  • What are some concrete next steps?

You will present during our final exam slot, Tuesday Dec 16, 9-11:00AM, for 1 hour and attend for the other hour. A rubric for the final presentation is included below. Note your group is assigned the same grade for the presentation.

Phase Four: Final Artifact

You are expected to produce a high quality final artifact that encapsulates your final project. This takes the form of a github repository which, in addition to the code for your project, includes a README.md with the following sections:

  1. Overview
    • Brief (roughly one paragraph) overview of your project, including its aims and the main findings/outcome (at a high level)
  2. Replication Instructions
    • Detailed instructions of how to replicate the results in your poster
  3. Future Directions
    • Brief (roughly one paragraph) overview of next steps/ways to improve on/concrete extensions of your project
  4. Contributions
    • Details on the contributions of each member to the project, including time spent (if a group of one you should still do this)

In addition to the github repository, you will also complete a self and team evaluation form. The responses to this will be used to calibrate (or recalibrate) your grades:

Your artifact is due at the end of our final exam slot, Tuesday Dec 16, 11:00AM. In evaluating your final artifact, you will be assigned an individual grade. I will consider:

  • Is the artifact clear and technically sound?
  • Is the artifact sufficiently detailed/documented (both the code and the README)?
  • Can the project be replicated on my end?
  • Is it clear that a sufficient amount of effort on your part has been put into the project?