COSC 387: Artificial Intelligence

Proposal Guidelines

Due: Oct 15, 5 PM (2 copies)

The purpose of a proposal is to clearly define a plan of research and to place your proposed approach in context with what has been done. It should provide enough detail so that someone with skills similar to yours could take the proposal and do the project. In essence, if we were to replicate you just before you started working on the proposal, and we put your copy into a sensory deprivation chamber until the due date of the proposal, then we should be able to give your proposal to the copy and expect that it could carry the project to completion.

A proposal for an experimental study might include the following sections:

  1. Introduction/Motivation
  2. Statement of the Problem
  3. Literature Survey
  4. Proposed Approach
  5. Plan of Experiments
  6. Evidence Supporting the Proposed Approach, if any (e.g., preliminary experimental results)
  7. Conclusion
  8. References
Although the exact organization of the proposal will vary depending on the type of research project you plan to pursue, you generally need to address the following questions:
  1. What is the specific problem you're attempting to address?
  2. Why is this problem important for the field or for society?
  3. How have others attempted to address this problem?
  4. How have the attempts of others fallen short?
  5. How do you plan to approach the problem?
  6. What is your research hypothesis?
  7. What is the outcome you expect?
  8. What experiment(s) will you conduct to support your hypothesis?
    1. What data set(s) will you use?
    2. How will you evaluate your system?
    3. What metrics will you use to measure performance?
Furthermore, if you write your proposal properly, much of it can be reused when you write your final paper.

You should pick a convention for citing material. I honestly don't care which one you pick as long as it is not of your own making and you use it consistently and correctly. The Chicago Manual of Style and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association both contain information about how to properly cite and reference scholarly material.

Not all references are created equal. Peer-reviewed journal and conference papers are the gold standard, so most of your references should come from these sources. Books, edited volumes, and invited papers are also important and acceptable. Newspaper and magazine articles are usually not acceptable except to motivate the need for research in a certain area. For example, a Post article on the number of computer break-ins at the Pentagon could be used to motivate research on machine learning approaches for computer intrusion detection.

Furthermore, in the age of the Web, you must be very careful about using material from Web pages, simply because there are no checks and balances, no filters for credibility and veracity, for what someone can place there. The Web is an important research tool, but one that does not yet supplant traditional library research. Students in the past have used material they found on the Web as if it came from a peer-reviewed source. If you're unsure about a reference, bring it by, and we'll take a look at it.

The proposal should roughly follow the same format as the research paper. Here are samples in PDF and PostScript formats: [sample.pdf | sample.ps].

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