Projects

Practical work is an essential part of learning. We offer you an opportunity to test your newly acquired machine learning skills against real-life problems. Please, read this page carefully and only then ask questions (in Piazza, adding a tag 'project').

Key dates:

• Team formation (team size is 2 - 4 students), until Oct 19
• Intermediate presentations Nov 16 - 18 (5 points out of 30 points)
• Final presentations Dec 14 - 16 (25 points out of 30 points)

Choosing a project

The first step is to find a project that is aligned with your interests. Here are several options:

From the partners:

Read carefully a list of projects proposed by our partners from this document. Although multiple teams are allowed to pick the same project idea (given that they work independently), still it might be better to pick a project from topics that have not been chosen so far or have fewer teams assigned to it. If you choose a project from one of the partners, we will connect you with the company/person who has proposed a project, so that you can get data and some guidance. Note, that extra time and care must be invested in communicating with a project owner and also meeting their expectations.

From Kaggle.com:

You can do a project by participating in one of the Kaggle.com competitions (e.g. Lyft motion prediction for autonomous vehicles) or working on some Kaggle dataset (e.g. solar power generation dataset). Kaggle challenges and the datasets are usually supported by ‘kernels’ where people document and publish their analysis code. You must declare all kernels that you use in your project and convince instructors (during presentations) that what you have done is different from the existing solutions and constitutes a sufficient amount of work worth 30 points.

Come up with a project yourself:

If neither option above is of interest to you, feel free to propose your own project, for example, you may decide to analyze some publicly available data (from here, here, here, here or here). Make sure there is a very explicit machine learning component in your project - you can consult with instructors if uncertain. If you already have a team, describe your project and the team in the project document. If you don’t have a team, you can advertise your project in Piazza under a special project related post (entitled "Project team search") and try to attract the team members.

Team formation (deadline: Oct 19)

After you have chosen a project (or came up with it yourself), you need to assemble a team or join the existing one. For that you can either advertise your project in a special project-related Piazza post (entitled "Project team search") or add a comment to someone else's post, letting them know that you want to join. Remember that the team size should be between 2 and 4 people. Please, wait for a positive response from the project owner before adding your name to the project document.

By the deadline on Oct 19 at 12:00 - Each team must add their project by specifying the title, project type (from partners, kaggle, or your own), project description, and team members into the project document. Follow the template in the beginning and check out our example project. If you plan to work on a project that was proposed by a partner, please, in the project type section specify the project identifier (e.g. based on P01 Word similarity). Also specify which day (Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday) you want to make your intermediate and final presentation. This would determine which practice session instructors will be grading your presentations.

Intermediate presentation: Nov 16 - 18 (5 points out of 30 points)

General guidelines for intermediate presentations:

• At least one member from the team (can be more than one) will present
• prepare a 5 minutes talk (with slides), if you go over time, we will cut you off;
• in the presentation make sure to introduce your team and project owner (if applicable);
• briefly describe the problem you are trying to solve (say why it needs to be solved);
• mention progress you have managed so far;
• tell about your blockers/problems;
• lastly, say few words about future steps (what are you going to accomplish for the final presentation).

Order of teams and the schedule of intermediate presentations are available in the document.

Final presentation: Dec 14 - 16 (25 points out of 30 points)

• At least one member from the team (can be more than one) makes a presentation about the project.
• As intermediate presentations, the final presentation will also be held solely online with two practice session leaders grading the presentations over Zoom.
• You have 5 minutes to make the final presentation
• in the presentation make sure to introduce your team and project owner (if applicable);
• briefly remind us the problem you are trying to solve (say why it needs to be solved);
• explain what was your approach to the problem (your methods);
• detail results you have obtained and how they match the initial expectations;
• lastly, describe a few main lessons that you have learned while working on the project.

Grading

We will grade your presentations based on roughly the following criteria:

• amount and complexity of work performed (40%),
• quality of presentation (30%),
• degree to which you have completed the initial task (25%),
• being on time (5%).

Project grades are assigned to each team member equally unless there is a good reason to believe that some team members have done significantly less or more work than others. The intermediate presentation gives a maximum of 5 points to every team member, while the final presentation accounts for 25 points. Both intermediate and final presentations are to be done during practice sessions (exception could be Monday presentations). Getting at least 15 points for the project is a prerequisite for passing the course.

There is no written report for the project. The only thing we will ask you to submit is a link to your project GitHub and presentation (in PDF).

Short summary of what you have to do:

1. Choose a project a) from a partner b) from Kaggle.com or c) come up with a project idea yourself.
2. Form a team (2 - 4 people including you) using Piazza or your contacts in the course.
3. Describe your project here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19NibeRF-fYvu8KUUPybO-2182xQNGmrspgoKs861cgY/edit#
4. Deliver an intermediate presentation on Nov 16 - 18 during a chosen practice session (either on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday)
5. Deliver a final presentation on Dec 14 - 16 during your chosen practice session