Course Project

In a quarter-long team or individual project, you will pursue a research project that furthers our understanding of human AI interaction. You are not expected to produce publishable work in the course of this quarter; that being said, the work should tackle an interesting research question. The onus is on you to contextualize what makes your research question interesting. When choosing a research project, your eventual goal should be to define a project that can become a publishable work after the quarter is over. Connecting to your research is encouraged if you have an ongoing research project that might relate to the topics in this course. Your project might be one of the following:

• Design and implement a new machine learning, computer vision, NLP, or AI model/system from which people can derive value.
• Conduct an empirical evaluation of a new or existing AI system using real human subjects. Subjects can be participants you recruit around campus or hire from platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk or Prolific.
• Perform a qualitative or quantitative analysis to understand people’s problems or impressions of an existing AI model and produce implications for the design of new technology.
• Identify human social or cognitive capabilities that are missing in existing models. Either evaluate how existing models have such capabilities or propose a new training paradigm that can result in the emergence of such machine capabilities.
• Conduct a critical analysis of existing AI models or academic literature in HCI, to produce design recommendations for new AI models/systems.
• New data collection or active learning methods that study the implications of the data being collected.
• Create new or study the effects of existing explanations or interpretable machine learning methods in new tasks.

At the conclusion of the project, your team will be responsible for writing a short research paper that summarizes the project. It should be 5-6 pages long (not including references) in the style of an IEEE CVPR conference paper (overleaf template, downloadable latex/word template).

If this is your first time writing a research project paper, here is a rough outline of sections that we recommend:

• Abstract (summarize the project’s motivation, methodology, and main findings),
• Introduction (explain why the project matters, lay out the primary innovation, lay out the findings, and end with a broader implications of your results.),
• Related work (contextualize your research amongst its closest related research projects),
• Methods (describe the process you used to conduct your research),
• Experiments/Study (explain your experimental or study setup and its main findings),
• Discussion (How do your findings can be interpreted and what others should take away from your project).

On the way to completing the research project, students will be required to submit a project proposal (1 page), and an intermediate project milestone (3-4 pages) report. Both of these will also be expected to utilize the CVPR template.

The project proposal should be a first draft of your introduction section of your final paper. It should try to answer the following questions:

• Describe the state of related work,
• Explain a problem that is unsolved given that statement,
• Introduce your ideas as an unique insight to tackle the problem or research question,
• Articulate the technical challenges you are likely to encounter,
• Plan out the experiments that justify the utility of the insight or answers the question,
• Your expected outcome

The project milestone should be a draft of your final course paper. It should include all sections except for the experiments section, which will be incomplete.