COMP364 Research paper presentation

The research paper presentation will summarize a state-of-the-art research paper in the field of artificial intelligence. Each student or team of students will pick a different paper from the conference AAAI 2010, read the paper and any necessary background literature, and present a summary of the paper. The list of papers to choose from is available in the online AAAI proceedings. (Note: The "student abstracts" at the end of the page are not eligible for selection.)

In choosing a paper, note that you are not necessarily required to understand all the mathematical details of the paper. In your final presentation, you must be able to clearly explain:

What is the problem the authors are trying to solve?
What is the basic idea behind the authors' solution to this problem?
How well does the idea work in practice?

Here is a list of paper titles from the link above that may be suitable for this project (however, you are free to choose any other paper presented at the conference, and don't hesitate to ask the instructor if you are unsure about whether a paper is a suitable):

Single-Frontier Bidirectional Search
Parallel Depth First Proof Number Search
Searching Without a Heuristic: Efficient Use of Abstraction
Using Lookaheads with Optimal Best-First Search
Coalitional Structure Generation in Skill Games
Approximation Algorithms and Mechanism Design for Minimax Approval Voting
Urban Security: Game-Theoretic Resource Allocation in Networked Domains
Automated Channel Abstraction for Advertising Auctions
Fixing a Tournament
User-Specific Learning for Recognizing a Singer's Intended Pitch
What Is an Opinion About? Exploring Political Standpoints Using Opinion Scoring Model
Automatic Attribution of Quoted Speech in Literary Narrative
A Fast Heuristic Search Algorithm for Finding the Longest Common Subsequence of Multiple Strings
Visual Contextual Advertising: Bringing Textual Advertisements to Images
News Recommendation in Forum-Based Social Media
Fast Algorithms for Top-k Approximate String Matching

There are the three milestones related to the presentation, labelled PP0, PP1, PP2. These milestones are described below.

PP0 (due Monday, October 11, 3pm; ungraded)

Notify the instructor of the paper you have chosen. Notification is by email to the instructor. Papers are selected on a first-come first-served basis. A list of the papers chosen so far is available.
Please also inform the instructor whether you will be working alone or with someone else, and if so, the name of your partner.
The PP0 milestone is ungraded.

PP1 (due Thursday, October 14, 3pm; worth 5 points)

Submit a 1-2 page document that includes:

a high-level summary of your chosen paper (around 0.5-1 pages)
a brief description of your strategy for presenting the paper, including what will be the important main points, and what will be left out.
a list of background reading that will be completed (a minimum of one other research paper is suggested, most likely selected from the references in your chosen paper)

PP2 (given in class on Monday, November 8; worth 95 points)

The PP2 milestone is the presentation itself. A detailed rubric for grading of the presentation is provided. The most important points to observe are:

Presentations are limited to 12 minutes, plus 3 minutes for questions.
The objective of the presentation is to communicate the main interesting idea of the paper to your classmates. You will need to present sufficient background or explanatory information for your classmates to understand the research, without wasting time on unnecessary details. As already stated above, the presentation must explain the main problem addressed by the paper, explain the basic idea behind the solution, and report on the effectiveness of the solution.
Your presentation should reference at least one other scholarly work, and briefly describe the relevance of that work.