Project Info

The goal of the project is to apply the knowledge you learned in class in a small scale study. The project deliverables are a short proposal outlining your motivation and planned outline, a final report containing methodology and findings, an implementation of your project and a short class presentation. We expect the project to be worked on in groups of two students, we highly encourage you to team up. As always, please familiarize yourself with and respect the high standards of academic integrity the University of Toronto adheres to https://www.academicintegrity.utoronto.ca/.

Several tutorial sessions will be dedicated to the project. Make sure that you attend these and adhere to the guidelines and tips presented. In addition, we strongly encourage discussing your projects on Pizza and with the TAs in the office hours, as well as your classmates. Since projects are individual, you can freely exchange helpful tips amongst yourselves and online. This document will also evolve to reflect frequently asked questions, so make sure to check in regularly.

Project structure

We encourage exploratory and experimental project and provide several potential project ideas. You can also work on your own idea, please check in with us to see whether the idea aligns with our expectations. No matter what you work on, we expect excellence regarding rigor and thoroughness in your investigation and an adherence to scientific standards in writing and presentation.

Possible projects include:

Project proposal

The project proposal should be a short document (1 page max) which summarize the project idea, the motivation for the project and an outline of what you will do to complete the project. You should take care to show that you have a clear target (i.e. you want to implement environment x, you want to build extension y), and explain what steps will be necessary to complete the project.

Note that we will not grade you on whether you achieved everything that was outlined in your proposal, but on the effort and thoroughness of your work. Some ideas fail due to unforseen consequences, in these cases we expect a clera investigation and explanation of causes for the lack of results.

Project proposal structure

Problem Statement (3/10)

Motivation and Impact (3/10)

Intuition (4/10)

Report structure

Your report should be cleanly written using \LaTeX~or an office program. A \LaTeX~template will be available on the course page.

The report should include the following sections:

It is sometimes the case that you are not able to get a desired level of performance, typically when the environment is too difficult or when the algorithm is not suited for that particular environment. In this case, please provide detailed explanations speculating on the cause of error, with accompanying experiments and data to justify your speculations. While you may still receive full marks, we nonetheless hope that you will be able to obtain some positive results.

We expect your report to be about 5-6 pages. There is no hard minimum or maximum, but please take care to be brief and precise. The length of the report will not impact the grading unless it is missing relevant information or becomes extremely and unnecessarily verbose.

Make sure to include references for all relevant related work and claims in your report. Using a citation tool such as bibtex can greatly help! At the minimum, include citations for your algorithm and the relevant extensions.

Code

We expect a clean and legible code submission as part of your project. Please provide instructions on how to recreate your experiments in form of a README or a jupyter/collab notebook. Clearly structure and comment your code.

If you use public repositories for algorithms, inspiration or utility functions, please point this out in the code at relevant sections and comment on how you adapted the code to your use case or improved on it. All code should be clean, legible and well documented and should come with clear instructions for installation and execution.

Grading

Your project will be graded according to the following guidelines: