Fall 2015 Computer Science 458 12/07/15

Announcements

• Office hours. Ronghui Gu is holding office hours at 305 AKW.

  Wednesday 2-4 pm.
  Thursday 7-9 pm.
  NOTE: changed per Piazza posting, 12/1/15
  

  Kun Run has office hours at 203 AWK.

  Monday 7-9 pm
  Friday 10am - 12pm
  

• hw3 statistics

    mean 98.1560283688
    median 100
    stdev 7.4260965404
    max 105
    min 60
    N 141
  

• Optional homework assignment: hwx.html

• New course in spring: CPSC 200: Introduction to Information Systems.

  Practical twin of CPSC 201. Taught in R and Python. You guys are eligible to be undergraduate peer tutors or graduate teaching fellows. Let me know if you are interested.

Final Project: Criteria

• Originality. I appreciate the degree to which you come up with new ideas. Though it may not be obvious, this applies to the default project as well. There are lots of ways to tackling the projects.

• Functionality. The program should work. It is best if we can run it ourselves, such as on the zoo. At the very least, you should provide ample evidence that the program does what it is supposed to do.

• Explanation. The program should explain its behavior. A good way to think about this is how you would explain your program's output to someone observing your program in action.

• Relevance to course. The program should have a connection to a topic or topics discussed in class, including the guest speakers. The more direct the connection, the better. Note that the best connection is through a method or technique, not a domain. Thus, applying Monte Carlo simulation to medicine is better than applying astrology to finance.

• Clarity. This is valued in thought, word, and deed. How clear is your concept? Do you describe it well in your write-up? Does your program clearly reflect your idea?

• Success. Actually, not so much. In a chemistry course, I selected a project of making polywater - a polymer form of water which had been reported by Soviet scientists. The professor encouraged me to pursue this and it failed. I was unable to replicate the Soviet experiment. (As it turns out, neither was anyone else.) My point is that you may learn from failure as well as from success.

Final Projects

• You should post your final project proposal to classes v2 in the assignments folder. We will review for approval.

• Some of you have not submitted proposals. Others have submitted proposals for which I posted questions to which you have not responded.

• Due date: end of reading period (December 16th). Can use late days, but not past end of exams.

• New final project option: you may work in a group. Your proposal and project needs to specify the division of labor - who is responsible for what.

• You may use late days when submitting the final project.

• One of the grading criteria is your program's ability to explain its decision. A black box solution, such as a neural network, does NOT have this property.

• Default Final Project: Buying a PC OK. I was going to make this a homework assignment, but I decided to make it a proposal for a final project instead. By way of incentive, anyone completing this assignment gets X extra points, where X is inversely proportional to the number of students handing this in.

  See hw4.

• Additional specifications:
  • Your project should run in the zoo. If you need additional libraries or software installed, you must clear it with the TF's.
  • You need to include a write-up explaining your project, including how to run it, what it does, what is interesting or important about it, how it explains the decision. Screen shots might be helpful as well.
  • You can create a web site. In this case, it may not need to run in the zoo. However, you need to submit all the code so that it could theoretically be run in the zoo.
  • Can you leverage a project for another course? It depends. You need to check with me first.
  • Can you change your project after your proposal? Well, yes. The real question is what happens if you do that? The answer is again, it depends. If your initial idea hits a wall and does not work, you probably should figure out another way to go.
• More notes:
  • If you submitted a proposal, you should have received a response. It usually was just "pass". This means that you have the green light to go ahead. If you submitted a proposal and did NOT get a response, there could be a couple of reasons.
    1. Your submission was empty. Maybe you had an attachment, but I could not see it.
    2. You proposed a project that was illegal. Come on guys, don't fool around.

  • In general, the ideas were great. Many of you have taken the opportunity to pursue something that is meaningful to you, whether that is curing a disease, breaking new ground in finance, or predicting the outcome of professional sporting events. Go team.

Final Project: The Hidden Agenda

Soon, you are going into the real world, or graduate school. You will be expected to identify and tackle problems that no one has solved before. This course was meant to provide a bridge to that world - to acclimatize you to various domains and provide you with multiple ways of thinking about decision making. In addition, the languages R and Python are valued outside academia.

Domains	Methods
Games Finance Risk management Internet advertising / real time bidding Facebook news feed Cybersecurity Investing … Sports PC selection Recommender systems Medicine Movies	Economic decision theory Monte Carlo simulation Capital budgeting Net Present value Rule based systems Case based systems Goal based systems … Statistical models - linear regression Machine learning, neural networks Collaborative filtering

My emphasis on cognitive science for decision making reflects the need to maintain a focus on the human in the loop, and particularly the importance to explain decisions.

The problem sets were often open ended, which required you to be resourceful. The guest speakers reinforced the idea that there is a spectrum of techniques that can be applied across a range of problem domains. The real world requires that you be open minded, and willing to learn new domains and new methodologies.

This course was meant to provide an intellectually safe space for you to experience those challenges. That way, you won’t be surprised when you see it in the real world.

Each of you had to weigh the resources you had and define what a solution looked like. With the project, you have the opportunity to identify a need or a problem and to come up with an original solution. This is true even for those of you choosing the default project. There are 1000's of ways to approach that problem.

I am pleased to see the energy and ambition of the class as reflected in the project proposals. The main point is that I want to encouraged you to think independently. That is why I give you a final project instead of a final exam.

Discussion

• Self driving cars

• Linear Regression

• Running VOTE on the zoo Class transcript

• Cognitive Models of Decision Making: VOTE

• An Intentional Arithmetic for Qualitative Decision Making

• Affect

• human.java (Java human class with emotions)