CMPSC 497 Final Project
Project Objectivs & Overview
Project Options
Project Critera
Project Deliverables
Project Point Breakdown
Project Milestones & Dates
Teams of 4 students
Due Dates: Important Milestones
Objectives
- Gain experience designing and developing an AI System given an area such that you think about the goals, environment, and adaptation
- Gain experience using some theory/method related to AI and applying that theory/method to a need. You may use an expanded version of a method we’ve gone directly over in class or pick another area of AI that we may have not gotten to, but still falls under the same ideals.
- Gain experience thinking about the cognitive/rational time scale (from the perspecctive of cognitive architectures) for the particular area/function/goal space your approaching when developing an AI system
- Gain further experience reading and reviewing previous research in an AI area (related to your method and needs).
- Gain further experience organizing your ideas related to a given need and solution into a coherent message.
- You’ll get to do this with your presentations, Paper, and (simulated) social media public communication
- Consider how your AI system may be (intentionally or unintentionally) used unethically or contribute to unethical practices and how this relates to existing ethical issues in the news/research.
- Consider how the Man (Wynter) shows up during implementation, integration, and/or use of the AI system you propose.
Final Project Overview
Let’s, start with these two passages from Abeba Birhane, who is at UC Dublin.
An implicit assumption that AI is some sort of autonomous, discrete entity separate from humans, and not a disruptive force for society or the economy, underlies this narrow one-dimensional view of AI and the preoccupation with the creation of artificial self. Sure, if your idea of AI revolves around sentient robots, that might bear some truth. This implicit assumption seems, to me, a hangover from Cartesian dichotomous thinking that remains persistent even among scholars within the embodied and enactive tradition who think that their perspectives account for complex reality. This AI vs humans thinking is misleading and unhelpful, to say the least.
AI systems are ubiquitous and this fact is apparent if you abandon the narrow and one-dimensional view of AI. AI algorithms are inextricably intertwined with our social, legal, health and educational system and not some separate independent entities as we like to envision when we think of AI. The apps that power your smart phone, the automated systems, including those that contribute to the decision towards whether you get a loan or not, whether you are hired or not, or how much your car insurance premium will cost you all are AI. AI that have real impact, especially on society’s most vulnerable.”
This project is your opportunity to apply a method or theory from AI to explore and try to solve a problem; this may be particularly for those of you who want to learn more about a theory/method before starting your final project.
However, the bigger opportunity is to consider how something you develop may be used in ways that are unethical and/or detrimental to society, especially those who tend to be marginalized by existing [societal, organizational, individual]-level systems. What’s more, you’ll have the opportunity to consider how your topic interacts with historical and/or current inequality and thus how AI may reinscribe, enable, or enact the singular Man genre of the Human (Wynter).
If you are looking for some places to start, I’d say go no further than the blog from which the quote above came (https://abebabirhane.wordpress.com/). I asked a few colleagues about recommendations a while back and I’ve found that blog to be useful as a starting point for some things. For a somewhat different, but related, critique, see Khadijah Abdurahman’s post on some previous work published at FAccT. (https://upfromthecracks.medium.com/fat-be-wilin-deb56bf92539)
Half of the work with these projects is identifying a need (or perhaps better put, a situation), understanding why we should care, and understanding why your take/solution is worth trying. Want to know why might not use the framing of a problem and solution? Check this article. Though this course has many transactional elements this meant to be more of an opportunity for it to be transformational. Though you will likely go on to allow much of the knowledge from this class to decay in memory, I want you to have an opportunity to cement some related knowledge in your memory through this project. If you do well enough (and are lucky enough to pick the correct problem), a project such as this could blossom into further applications and/or research (maybe even a published research paper!)
This End point of the project will involve four major parts:
The research paper, The implementation (in code), The presentation (keynote, powerpoint, prezi, etc.), The (simulated) social media public communication.
You will carry out the following steps (not necessarily in order) to bring your project from concept to completion:
1) Select your team. Teams should consist of 4 people (One group may have 3 students due to numbers). I will require that everyone can explain any part of the work (within reason).
2) The team will work together to decide on a particular need or situation they would like to approach with a given theory or method in AI and/or Cognitive Science and what the goal of applying this theory or method will be. The need/situation formulation is important (what is it that you wish to tackle and why is it important?) Your need/situation can be a (reasonable) ultimate problem that you wish to tackle by exploring smaller or toy situations/needs.
3) Once you have established the situation, you will begin to map out a proposed model that can be used to explore or address the situation. This will provide a high-level explanation of how you think whatever method or theory you’re using will apply to the problem at hand and accomplish your goal.
4) To help map this out, you will use the Designing AI worksheet from the beginning of the semester to describe your planned project in terms of goals of your AI system, the environment(s) in which your system operates, and how your AI system will adapt to the environment to achieve said goals. This is what is due for your phase 1
5) I will work with teams on some designated project work days to check on the status and get estimates of time for the completion of the project. While I will be available to try to make sure you don’t go off into a barren desert, and can help point you to resources if you wish to use a method that we have not gone over, the point of this portion is to give you freedom to do something that you may think is cool using theories and methods from AI and/or Cognitive Science. - To help foster this, during these days I will ask everyone to bring along one burning question that you’d like to try to discuss in class.
6) Make sure you implement things as you go along to test theories and/or methods you want to use! I would suggest that groups meet 2 or more times a week in person to make sure you’re staying on track with the actual work. You don’t want to save all of the work for the last week.
There will be 3 Phases in this project
- Phase 1 (developing the idea & proposing to use a certain method) – This is where you will hopefully begin to get a good idea and map of what you will be doing! The product from this phase should be at least a Goals, Environment, and Adaptation worksheet filled out for your approach.
You’re environment will include who is potentially interacting with your potential AI system and how you might think of this interaction in terms of a cognitive architecture/cognitive system (e.g., ACT-R). This can be a high-level description
- Phase 2 (the rough draft phase). By the end of this phase (marked by the end of the phase due date) you will have a rough model or program of your approach to your chosen problem and you will have a rough draft of your paper (i.e., a partially filled outline). You will be tasked with giving a 4-minute (max) presentation for this phase that will provide an update to your progress.
PRESENTATION SHOULD BE IN-PERSON, OR RECORDED VIDEO + QUESTIONS IN PERSON
- Phase 3 (Show me what you’ve done!). This is the final phase and at the end you will have a completed project! You will have completed implemented software and a research paper/report on your project. You will be tasked with giving a 10-12 minute presentation for this phase that will give details of your project (layout the problem, your approach, past related uses of your approach, past uses of other approaches to the situation, etc.) and also a (video) demo of the implementation of your solution.
- For this phase you will also complete a (simulated) social-media based public communication about your project. Think about it as a less formal version of your research paper. For example, you could use a bluesky-style (micro-blog) thread to address the ethical discussions related to your project. This is a great opportunity to cite news articles, blog posts, etc. related to your project.
- In addition to the deliverable above, your code should have documentation that details how to run, it, what it does, etc. You should include this as separate document altogether.
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Project options
This year, we will have Themes for projects. Groups will be formed based on preferences for different themes.
I am leaving the project up to you. It’s up to you to look at the world around us and pick out a problem related to your group’s theme that you want to explore and to which you wish to apply theory/methods from AI. The themes are below:
AI and Policing
AI and Play
AI and Human Behavior
AI and Health
AI and the Environment
AI and Education
AI and Capitalism
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Project Criteria
All projects/papers must have multiple scholarly (peer reviewed) references! (This includes books)
All projects/papers must have multiple scholarly (peer reviewed) references! (This includes books)
All projects/papers must have multiple scholarly (peer reviewed) references! (This includes books)
Teams
Git
You should make sure you’re using a shared group folder or repository (i.e., Git) to manage all of your material for your project. Git and shared folders/docs can also help resolve disagreements on how much work is being done and can be a tool for arguing the case for contribution ratings for a specific project.
We’ll use a new git template (and new github classroom assignment to start us off for this project)
Goals, Environment, Adaptation Sheet
You should fill out the GEA worksheet for the first Phase of this project. Within your Environment section, I want you to layout who the stakeholders are for your system and reflect upon how your system may positively or negatively each of these stakeholders. You should use this as a part of your Final Report as well as your presentations.
Design and Implementation Details
You will provide details and documentation on the design of your system (including the GEA worksheet and a detailed README.md)
It also is expected that your implementation code will be documented well
Research Paper
Your final research report should be 10-12 pages in APA format (particularly citations and bibliography) and 1.5 line space formatting. This should allow you to write enough to explain your problem, approach, and past research related to your work. I expect references and a bibliography section. You can find APA format online. Reference managers can be very useful for keeping all of your references in one place (especially in a group). One thing to remember is that figures can be your friend! Too often, new scientists seem to be afraid of figures. Use them to your advantage when they are the best way to explain something.
In addition to the requirements in the rubric, your paper should broadly tell the reader: What the situation is and why we should care, the goals of your project and how your project approaches the situation, discussion/thoughts from the results/experience of your chosen project+solution pair.
Man and the Human perspectives
Within your research paper, you should have a section dedicated to the idea and concept of Man genre of the Human, particularly how this specific genre of the Human may manifest itself within the design, development, integration, and lifecycle of your AI system.
Cognitive Architecture/Cognitive Systems Perspective
Within your research paper, you should have a section dedicated to cognitive/rational band perspectives on your particular situation. That is, thinking through how individual-level behaviors may manifest themselves in interacting with your AI system using a Common Model of Cognition/Standard Model of the Mind framework. Utlimately, this should align with the simplified ACT-R model that you create (see the last sub-section within project criteria for more information on what is expected of your model.)
Readme
Final Presentation
Your team will be required to give a 10 minute presentation.
There are two options for how you present here:
1) You can present Live
- Here, you will use the 10 minutes to present your project to the class and I’ll make time for questions
- You should be sure your presentation works on the classroom computer sometime before your presentation date.
- But, what if your group doesn’t want to do a live presentation (but just wants to get question and discussion regarding your presentaion)?
2) You can present via recorded video
- Here, you will record a presentation video (could be Zoom or some other format, feel free to get fairly creative within the requirements), that will need to be uploaded 2 days before your presentation time, and that the class will view before class so that they’ll be ready with questions
- You will have to make sure you have captions available on your video here. If you don’t send me a video with captions, I won’t be able to guarantee that you won’t have to present live.
Generally, your presentation should present the problem in detail (including why we should care, or at least why you care), past approaches to solving the problem, past uses of your approach to other problems, and your solution. I’d also like a discussion on the progression of the project itself (what dead-ends did you reach? What surprises did you find? etc.)
More specifically, your presentation must provide answers to the following:
- What was your team project?
- Establish required background for the domain & situation of interest so that everyone knows what you are talking about
- Establish a motivation for your domain & situation. Why is this an important project?
- Discuss what has been done for your situation before?
- Describe those in sufficient detail with references
- Discuss your design and implementation
- What are the major components of your model/implementation?
- Draw a figure to show a high-level view of your solution
- Any especially interesting approaches that you chose to use, or tried to use and decided against it? Discuss it!
- Major AI algorithms? Major Cognitive Science Theory/Algorithms? Informed by Psychological Theory? Focus on using aspects of the environment to represent knowledge? Build a robot with consciousness?
- What are the major components of your model/implementation?
- Discuss connections between your project and existing ethical issues in AI, including how those contexts connect with Wynter’s idea of the Human and Man. You should use the material that you will be using in your simulated social media, public communication artifact here and take the opportunity to talk a bit about it as a preview of sorts to the medium article.
- Conclude by discussing challenges in the project, what you learned, and what you would change if you could go back and start over and why.
Simulated social media artifact
This simulated public communication (social-media-based) artifact is another chance at being creative (as opposed to the more formal Research Report). You could do a Bleusky thread or some kind of public communications TikTok (for example) This is also a place where you can and should expand on social connections to your project, including thinking a bit through genres of the Human
Thus, touch on all of the same stuff with your artifact, but place a greater emphasis upon the social/societal connections.
(For the Bluesky Thread) Max characters per page - 280 Expect page range (i.e., number of posts in thread) - 10-15
A (simplified) cognitive model
Let’s move beyond just talking about the cognitive/rational band and connections to the situation and need you’ve chosen, let’s try to make a (likely simplified!) cognitive model for your situation that touches on the important cognitive processes, behaviors, etc. that can be imagined/idealized when thinking of an individual interacting with their environment in your particular situation. Thus, you’ll need to create and document the situation for your model (which includes aspects of your environment) and consider the cognitive/knowledge elements of that situation. To make things easier (simpler) all around, this model should be a Python ACT-R model.
Deliverables
Your delivered work should be coherent and organized according to the github sample template.
Readme
Readme.md
For more info check the relevant section in Project Criteria
Goals, Environment, and Adaption Worksheet
docs/GEA.pdf
Your Goals, Environment, and Adaptation Sheet
For more info check the relevant section in Project Criteria
Research Report
docs/ResearchReport.pdf
- This is the main research paper where you should go into the problem you tackled, why you chose it, and what you did to try to solve that problem. This should be written like a research paper and have sufficient background on the subject. It should provide some detail on your implementation, but more on the background and the results of your implementation. The conclusion should discuss not only what was correct about your approach, but also what was wrong. You should have a solid foundation of citations (and a references section) to back-up claims made in the paper.
- A specific grading rubric is given below
TOTAL: Approx. 10-12 pages.
For more info (beyond the rubric) check the relevant section in Project Criteria
Team self-assessment
You must individually submit on Canvas your own assessment of each partner’s contribution (including yours) to the project. The details of the assessment are given below in the milestones section.
Simulated social media artifact
This should be placed in the docs directory.
For more info check the relevant section in Project Criteria
For a Bluesky thread - approx. 10-15 pages, 280 chars (max) per page
Your project code
You should have your implementation pushed to git, and well organized!
The code should be placed in the implementation directory
Your cognitive model code and documentation should be placed in the implementation/cog-model directory
Point Breakdown
In general, the break down used to grade the final project is as follows:
| Graded item | Number of points |
|---|---|
| GEA Worksheet (Phase 1) | 5 pts [all of none] |
| Phase 2 Presentation | 5 pts |
| Phase 2 Rough Draft | 5 pts [all or none] |
| README.md | 8 pts |
| All files are organized as instructed | 2 pts |
| Social Media Artifact | 10 pts |
| Final Research Report | 20 pts |
| Implementation - overall | 21 pts |
| Implementation - ACT-R model | 4 pts |
| Final Project Presentation | 20 pts |
Phase 2 Presentation (5 pts)
| Graded item | Number of points |
|---|---|
| You introduce everyone in your group | 1 pts |
| Introduction situation(s)/question(s)/need(s)/dataset(s) | 2 pts |
| Description of current planned solutions | 1 pt |
| Potential issues presented | 1 pts |
Final Report Rubric (20 total pts)
| Graded item | Number of points |
|---|---|
| Introduction introduced situation(s)/question(s)/problem/dataset(s), connections to literature, and foreshadows solution | 3 pts |
| Description of solution/system built to explore and think through situations, questions, and/or needs | 3 pts |
Relevant Connections to (at least) one reference from Introduction Module articles/selected literature | 1 pts |
Relevant Connections to (at least) one reference from Cognitive Science Module articles/selected literature | 1 pts |
Relevant Connections to (at least) one reference from AI & the Human Module articles/selected literature | 1 pts |
Relevant Connections to (at least) one reference from AI in Contexts Module articles/selected literature | 1 pts |
| Section on Cognitive Systems adequately makes connections to Common Model of Cognition (Standard Model of Mind) Framework | 1 pts |
| Section on Man genre of the Human adequately discusses ways in which Man genre may show up in AI dev, integration, use, etc. | 2 pts |
| Conclusion provides concluding thoughts, future analysis work, any potential analysis, discussion, and adeqautely concludes report | 3 pts |
| Page length is appropriate for meeting requirements and is no longer than 12 pages | 2 pts |
| Formatting is correct (according to requirements) and consistent | 2 pts |
Final Presentation Rubric (20 Total Points)
| Graded item | Number of points |
|---|---|
| You introduce everyone in your group | 1 pts |
| Re-introduce the situation(s)/question(s)/need(s) they’re approaching | 2 pts |
| Introduce & discuss the actual solution/system (full outcome) to the situation | 2 pts |
| Talk about any changes/additions to dataset(s) or model(s) that you might have needed to make | 1 |
| Present a high level sketch or diagram of your AI system (major components) | 2 |
| Provide appropriate evidence that your system is a reasonable proposed solution/system | 2 pts |
| Provide a short discussion between your project and existing ethical issues in AI | 3 pts |
| Discuss challenges in project and what you learned | 2 pts |
| Appropriately answer questions asked during the Q&A | 2 pts |
| At least 3 group members talk during the presentation | 1 pts |
| Presentation does not go over time and is appropriately timed | 2 pts |
Important Milestones
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 05-Mar | Project assigned — Select team members and project |
| 08-Mar, 11:00pm | One person from the team should Submit (to Canvas) team information to include the following information: • Name of your team • Project chosen • Project description — include 1–2 paragraphs stating the project description in your own words. • Perceived strengths and weaknesses of each team member (i.e., how do you envision dividing up duties?) This should be determined from an open, collaborative discussion among the teammates. |
| 19-Mar, 09:00am | _Design AI__ worksheet due for your project |
| 02-Apr, In class | Introduction (Phase 2) presentation that introduces the class to your chosen project (4 mins max per group) |
| 03-Apr, 09:00am | A rough draft (outline will do) of your final paper, and a rough sketch of the layout and content of your Simulated social media artifact (this could be as simple as you transforming your outline in a way that makes sense for your artifact). |
| 23-Apr, 28-Apr, & 29-Apr, in class | Final In-class presentations (10 minutes each + ~3 minutes to Q&A). |
| 02-May, 11:00pm | All project material is due. NO LATE WORK ACCEPTED. |
| 02-May, 11:00pm | Team Self-Assessment – Every member must submit to Canvas a team assessment In the text submission, clearly indicate: • Name of your team • Project chosen • Members on the team • For each member, including yourself, indicate who worked on what • Rate the amount of work each member contributed as a percentage of the total work. • If the work effort in your opinion was not evenly distributed, please clearly justify why. (For example, for a 5-member team, if the work was not near 25% for each member, then a justification is warranted.) |