Term Paper

The term paper consists of three phases (see the timetable for deadlines) as well as a quick spotlight presentation at the end of the semester.

Phase 1:

Scan through the journals and conferences listed below and identify 10+ papers you would like to give a quick read.
You must pick recent papers which appeared in, say, last five years.
Most of these journals and proceedings are available online through the library (under the "search" heading in the opening page).

Also, familiarize yourself with latex.

Return a short report which explains the rationale of your search (were you interested in a particular area, or even a particular problem? Why?) along with
1. list of conferences and journals you went through
2. References to the papers you picked.
You can modify the term paper template below and use it for your phase 1 and phase 2 documents.

Phase 2 (Proposal):

Pick 3-4 related papers which you will read carefully and understand. Typically these papers would be in your phase 1 list.
Return a short report which contains
1. Rationale (explain the relationship between the papers. Typically, they would be addressing the same problem)
2. The papers you picked (include a short description of the specific problem in each paper)
3. Necessary background: fundamental topics one should know to understand these results

Phase 3 (Term paper)

Read the papers from Phase 1, along with associated background material,
and write a paper using the following template: [yourname_termpaper.tex, yourname_termpaper.pdf]
Your term paper should be 7-10pages long.

Example:

Suppose you are interested in "navigation in dynamic and complex environments". So you review AI and Robotics Journals and identify papers for Phase 1.

While going over your phase 1 papers you realize that pursuit-evasion is an interesting, specific problem in this area.
In particular, "visibility based pursuit-evasion" attracts your attention because it takes place in complex polygons and there are players with conflicting interests which makes decision making challenging.
So, you identify the three papers in csci4150.bib and write your phase 2 proposal on them.

When you are writing your term paper, you realize that one needs to know about properties of shortest paths in polygons, as well as some tail inequalities in probability.
So you include these topics in the preliminaries section of your term paper.



If the papers you select are not from these journals or conferences listed below, please check with me:

List of AI and Related Journals

Journals listed as Premium or Leading in this list.

Note: IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation has recently split into two jounals:
IEEE Tran. on Robotics
IEEE Tran. on Automation
Both are acceptable.

List of AI and Related Conferences

Artificial Intelligence:
AAAI: American Association for AI National Conference
IJCAI: Intl Joint Conf on AI
UAI: Conference on Uncertainty in AI
ICAA: International Conference on Autonomous Agents

Computer Vision:
CVPR: IEEE Conf on Comp Vision and Pattern Recognition
ICCV: Intl Conf on Computer Vision
ECCV: European Conference on Computer Vision


Robotics:
ICRA: IEEE Intl Conf on Robotics and Automation
IROS: IEEE/RSJ Intl Conf on Intelligent Robots and Systems
RSS:  Robotics: Science and Systems
WAFR: Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics

Learning & Data Mining:
ICML: Intl Conf on Machine Learning
KDD: Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
KR:  Intl Conf on Principles of KR & Reasoning
NIPS: Neural Information Processing Systems

Language:
ACL: Annual Meeting of the ACL (Association of Computational Linguistics)
COLING: International Conference on Computational Liguistics
EMNLP: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
EACL: Annual Meeting of European Association Computational Lingustics
CoNLL: Conference on Natural Language Learning



Useful Latex Pointers

Some files to get you started: latex_starter.tex, latex_starter.pdf. You will also need csci4150.bib, and chain.eps.

The commands I used to generate the pdf file:

$ latex latex_starter
$ bibtex latex_starter
$ latex latex_starter
$ latex latex_starter
$ dvips -t letter -o latex_starter.ps  -Ppdf latex_starter
$ ps2pdf latex_starter.ps 

(note: you don't need to bibtex everytime you latex)

Useful references:


Good luck!