Numbers
Due: March 24, 2009 23:59:59 EST
Please have one of your
group members submit this assignment
via tsquare. Please include the
names of everyone in your group in the body of the email message. You
may send text or pdf.
The assignment is worth 5% of your final grade (or 20% of your project grade). More importantly, if you don't do it you will have violated a requirement of the project and will suffer greatly for it.
Why?
Well before now you should have familiarized yourself with the data you're going to use and the problem you're going to pursue. After feedback from your advisor(s), having thought about it some more, and having actually done some of the work, your view of what the problem is has probably changed somewhat, at least in the details.
It is important to understand that if you have not made some progress by this point, you're in trouble.
What to turn in
A three-to-five page formal progress report. It looks somewhat like your formal proposal, and must clearly address:
Problem description. A concise problem description, including a description of the data sets you will use (if applicable). Be sure to highlight how your problem has changed since your initial proposal.
Research goals. A discussion of what the different outcomes should be. In particular tell us how you will know when the project is successful. This should probably be more specific than your formal proposal. Again, feel free to highlight how your goals have changed as you've explored the problem.
Project Plan and Accomplishments. A project plan, outlining in detail what your experiments are and will be. You should have performed some initial experiments by now and done much of that "consulting specific literature" you said you were going to do, so you should clearly indicate which parts of your plan you have accomplished. If your plan has changed at all from your formal proposal, please explain the differences.
Individual Tasks. A description of the tasks that will be performed by the individual team members. As noted before, each of you is in a class about machine learning, thus each team member has to engage in interesting machine learning work. Again indicate how the tasks have changed since the formal proposal.
Preliminary Results. A series of graphs, tables, or whatever that show the results of your initial experiments. Discuss how these results have affected your plans, if at all.
Please note: this material will not only be graded by us, but will be handed to your reviewers so they will have enough time to do background reading and preparation for their full review. They'll be forming an opinion early. This is your first impression.
Be concise. Be concrete. Be aware that there are only three weeks left.