Probabilistic Graphical Models and Structured Prediction Project
CS6424/ECE6424 Spring 2016

Project Report

For the class project, you will conduct research with the goal of producing findings worthy of publication at a conference. The project should be done in groups of 1–3 students, and should feature a novel algorithmic contribution to some aspect of learning, inference, prediction, analysis, or application using probabilistic graphical models or structured predictors. You are strongly encouraged to incorporate this project with any other research you are working on, and you are welcome to include collaborators outside the class as long as you are doing a substantial proportion of the research yourself.

You will write a 6–10 page paper on your findings due at the end of the semester, reporting your contribution, background material, evaluation (experiments and/or analysis), and conclusions.

The final paper should have the usual structure of a scientific paper:

• The paper should begin with an abstract, which should be no longer than two paragraphs describing what problem you are addressing and what your discovories were.
• The paper should have an opening introduction section that describes the motivation, the problem you are addressing, and your approach to solving the problem.
• The middle of the paper should describe your technical contribution in detail. The middle may be broken up into multiple sections, for example one describing an algorithmic approach and another describing experimental setup and results. A reader should be able to reproduce your experimental results or analysis from reading this middle of the paper.
• Your paper must include a section that discusses prior work: research that studies related problems, or the same problem you are addressing, other approaches that are related to your technical approach that may or may not have been applied to the same type of application, or foundational mathematical or scientific ideas you are building on. Establish in this section why none of these existing studies solves the problem your contribution aims to fix.

• The paper should end with a conclusion that summarizes your contributions and discusses open problems that remain.
• Lastly, your paper should end with a list of references. We strongly recommend using bibTeX (or bibLaTeX) to make bibiographies, because it does a lot of formatting automatically.

Your paper should follow this modified version of the NIPS paper format (the original version is from here). Use the camera-ready option to show your author information, as done in this example file. In a separate file, describe each person's contributions to the project.

The final project report is due 11:59 pm on May 3, 2016. Submit your project report by sending it in an email to bhuang@vt.edu.

Include the writeup, a brief statement about each team member and external collaborator's contributions to the project, and brief statement about whether you're willing to have your paper posted on the class website.

Grading Criteria

The project will be graded with the understanding that research takes an unpredictable amount of time, and this project is done under the strict time constraints of a class project. Nevertheless, your work should demonstrate

• understanding of the background literature surrounding your project;
• a clear motivation and description of the proposed idea;
• and results from some proof-of-concept experiments or analyses.

I will grade using the following breakdown as a guideline, and I will make adjustments to ensure you get a fair grade.

• Writing quality: 5 points
• Literature review: 5 points
• Technical quality (soundness of proposed approach): 10 points
• Evaluation (experiments and/or analysis) and conclusions: 10 points