CS 151: Assignment 3
Literature Review [90 points]
Part A Due Wednesday, February 27, 11:55pm
Part B Due Wednesday, March 5 11:55pm
The goals of this assignment are to:
- Get you more exposure to and experience with current AI research
- Have you practice your CS research skills
- Learn how to critique and review research papers
The end product of this assignment is a critical review of three
computer science papers from the primary literature. Details on
how you will complete these reviews are given below.
Part A: Finding your literature
Your first task is to select the papers you will review for this
assignment. To help you with this process, you should choose one
of your papers from the list below (and only one). Then, you
should find two more papers closely related to the same problem.
Here is the list of papers to choose from (sorry I don't have links to
all of them, but they are all available online, either directly or
through the Claremont library electronic resources):
- Option 1:
Heuristic Search
- D. Davidov and S. Markovitch (2006)
"Multiple-Goal
Heuristic Search", Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Volume
26, pages 417-451
- Option 2: Games
- Choose any article (except the first introductory
article) from: Artificial Intelligence (2002), Volume 134:
Special Issue on Computers and Games
- Option 3: Bayes Nets + First Order Logic
-
D. Koller and A. Pfeffer (1998). "Probabilistic frame-based systems." Proceedings of the 15th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (pp. 580-587).
- Option 4: Applications of Bayesian networks
You will notice that all of these papers deal only with topics we have
covered (or will cover shortly). If you want to choose a
different area that we have not yet talked about, please talk to me.
Once you have chosen your paper, you should choose two more papers that address the same problem
that the first paper addresses. This will require having a good
understanding of what problem the paper actually addresses (a
non-trivial task).
While it is tempting to rely only on Wikipedia and Google to find your
other two sources, you should avoid this method by and large (unless
you are using Google to locate a specific piece of information, like a
person's homepage or a specific paper). In general, you want
to track down related work through the following reputable sources:
- People who have a reputation of doing good work in the
area. You can assess the quality of a person's work by
looking at where they publish their papers, how much their papers are
referenced by others, and how much of the field their own papers
reference. You can assume the author of the provided paper is
someone who does good work.
- Reputable conferences and journals in the topic area
(listed below). Feel free to contact me if you want
to ask about a specific conference
- Papers referenced by other reputable papers (look at the
citations in a given paper)
- Papers that reference other reputable papers.
It's harder to "look forward in time", but it can be done.
Google scholar and a site called citeseer
allows you to search for papers that reference specific other papers.
As a guide, here are some major conferences and journals in AI.
The above are major, general journals and conferences. There
are also several reputable conferences and journals in subtopics in AI.
Ask me if you need help finding them or if you are unsure
about a particular journal or conference.
What to submit for Part A
Submit a single document that contains the following information:
- The initial paper you chose from the above list
- The “problem” that this paper addresses, and why this “problem” is important.
- A list of the “buzz words” or keywords in your topic area and what they mean (in your own words).
- Citations for your other two chosen papers, and, for each paper, a sentence or two about why you chose each.
- Biographical/contextual information about each paper including:
- Author information for all of the authors: Where do they work and what is their main research area?
- Information about the publication venue--why does it make sense that the paper was published where it was?
Part B: The reviews
After you submit part A, I will approve your selection of papers.
Do not start reviewing your two additional papers until after you
get feedback on part A. I will give you feedback no later than
Saturday, March 1 (hopefully by Friday, Feb 29). However, you can
start on the review of your initial paper right away.
The next phase of this assignment is the reviews themselves. Your
task is to write a critical review of each of your papers.
Each review should be about 1-2 pages in
length (for a total of 3-6 pages). The format you should use is a
short-answer rather than
long-essay format. That is, you should specifically address each of the
points below. In your writeup you should list the point, and then
give a concise, informative response to the point. You should write
clean, coherent well-structured text. Just because you are
answering specific questions, does not mean you can forget about
grammar, organization, etc.
Here are the points you must address in your review:
- Summarize the work in 1 paragraph
- What problem are the authors trying to solve?
- What are this work's main contributions?
- Is this work technically sound? (i.e., How good is the solution? How convinced are you that it works?)
- Comment on the quality of the writing.
- What (and how much) impact will this work have (has it had) on
its field? (Note: Because these papers have already been published,
they
(hopefully!) have already had an impact on the their field. If
your research revealed the impact of this paper's work, state it.
Otherwise, try to "predict" what that impact was/might be.)
To help you write this review, I give some general and specific
tips below:
- Keep your comments brief and to the point.
- Back up your claims by citing
specific examples from the paper whenever possible.
- Write a rough draft, then go back and revise it just as you would
any essay or paper.
- Imagine that your comments will be read by the authors of the
paper. Try to make your comments as helpful to them as possible.
What to submit for Part B
You should submit a single file containing your three reviews. This file can be in Word, PDF or plain text format.