Your final project can be on any topic related to ethical and social issues in AI. Most projects will take the form of a research paper, such as a computational paper (describing a new system you built, or a replication of someone else's published work, a theoretical result, etc.), an analytic paper, or a position paper, but feel free to propose an alternate format.
It should be done in groups, ideally of 2-3 students.
The final project encompasses 3 deadlines: a literature review paper, a written research proposal, and a final paper. We will also hold brief in-class midterm proposal presentations and final presentations so students can share their work with each other.
This is a short paper (min 4 pages, max 8 pages) summarizing and synthesizing several papers (or works in general) in the area of your final project. The grading rubric is here.
Groups of one should review 5 papers, groups of two should review 7 papers, and groups of three should review 9.
Most people will choose the same topic for your lit review and final paper, but this is not required, and the lit review will be graded on its own.
Some suggestions on lit review structure from Chris Potts and Bill MacCartney from Stanford course CS224U:
The project proposal will include two components: an in-class presentation and a written proposal.
In-class presentation: Each group will have 5 minutes to present their project idea to the class. All groups will upload their slides to the same presentation to avoid switching computers. We will have a collaborative-edit document for others in the class to provide questions and feedback (10/17).
Written proposal: this is in the form of a short grant proposal, outlining your project and convincing us why it's worth doing. Keep it around 2-4 pages and please use the ACM template in a double column mode (e.g \documentclass[nonacm, sigconf]{acmart}). Feel free to delete the teaser photo, CSS Concepts, and keywords (10/26)
Both the written proposal and in-class presentation should provide a concrete overview of your proposed project. For an experimental or scientific paper, the kinds of things you should include are: the problem you're solving and why it's important, and what will be the implications if you solve it, the hypothesis you are testing, the data, models, and metrics, what remains to be done, need to do, mentioning outstanding decisions and obstacles. For a position or survey paper, lay out the landscape of your claim or area of survey, tell us how you are deciding on the scope to be surveyed or the question you are taking a position on, as well as obstacles, decision points, and expected impact. The written proposal should also include a summary of initial work, such as data statistics, off-the-shelf-model performance, or some initial survey themes (for a survey paper)
The grading rubric is here.
Written report (Due Dec 15): Most final papers will be in the form of an ACM-style paper. Please use the ACM template in a double column mode (e.g \documentclass[nonacm, sigconf]{acmart}). Feel free to delete the teaser photo, CSS Concepts, and keywords. The paper should be 6-8 pages long, in ACM submission format and adhering to ACM guidelines concerning references, layout, supplementary materials, and so forth. Position/survey papers, are welcome and have more leeway to use whatever format makes sense. Try to keep it to 8 pages.
For group projects (or those that have involved help from others) include a brief authorship statement at the end of your paper, explaining how the individual authors contributed to the project. This statement is required even for singly-authored papers, because we want to know whether your project is a collaboration with people outside of the class.
In-class presentation (Dec 5 and Dec 7): In the final week of class, we will have in-class presentations so that students can share work with others. Each group will have 8 minutes to present their project idea to the class. All groups will upload their slides to the same presentation to avoid switching computers. We will have a collaborative-edit document for others in the class to provide questions and feedback
The grading rubric is here.