CSSE 490, Assignments

CSSE 490: Assignments

[Due: Wednesday February 23, at noon] Take-home final.
[Due: Friday February 18, at 5pm, with a three day grace period.] The project report. Please submit your report to the appropriate drop-box. Please also submit any software you produced and the powerpoint slides of your presentation, if you had slides.
[Due: Thursday February 10, at the beginning of class] Read the paper "Go to the Ant": Engineering Principles from Natural Multi-Agent Systems by Parunak. Write a half to one page summary of the main ideas of this paper. On Thursday, we want to discuss the article in class.
[Due: Monday January 24 at 8am]. Perform an extensive search of prior work, as found on the web and in professional journals. Submit a document containing a list of references with prior work, and a very brief review of applicable prior work. I imagine this to be at most two paragraphs in length. Also provide a brief explanation of how you will build on the prior work and how you plan to extend it. Submit your document to the appropriate homework drop box. Also, please email me articles that you think may be good candidates for a class presentation (not necessarily by you.) Finally, submit a brief project plan.
[Due: Monday January 17 at 8am][This deadline has been extended.] Project proposal
[Due: Friday January 14 at the beginning of class. Define the key characteristics of Swarm Intelligence. Submit your documents in the appropriate drop box. Feel free to work on this assignments in groups.
[Due: Thursday January 13 at the beginning of class. List some phenomena which can be modelled as Swarm Intelligence. List some phenomena which cannot be modelled as Swarm Intelligence. Write down your answers with a brief explanation. Submit your documents in the appropriate drop box. Feel free to work on this assignments in groups.
[Due: Thursday December 16, at the beginning of class] Read the article Steering Behaviors for Autonomous Characters by Craig Reynolds. Write a half to one page summary of the main ideas of this paper. On Thursday, we want to discuss the article in class.
[Due: Wednesday December 15 and Wednesday January 5 at midnight] First programming assignment.
[Due: Tuesday November 30, at the beginning of class] Read the article Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think About Business by Eric Bonabeau and Christopher Meyer. Write a half to one page summary of the main ideas of this paper. On Tuesday, we want to discuss the article in class and establish an initial taxonomy of swarm intelligence.
For each presentation, everyone has to read at least the abstract, introduction and conclusions, and should skim the paper for interesting information, if the paper is available online.
Presenters have to read, understand, and present the paper. You also have to lead the class discussion following your presentation. You want to do two things: (1) give a concise presentation of the material in the paper (2) evaluate the contributions of the paper.
You probably end up reading the paper several times. While you want to be critical of the material presented in the papers, you want to give a fair presentation of its contents. Attempt to be an advocate of the authors. If portions of the paper do not come to you, feel free to contact the lead author. They will be thrilled about your inquiry, because there is nothing like knowing that people actually read your papers. More likely than not, they will be more than happy to explain things to you and provide you with additional materials. So please start on your papers early, so as to get the chance to contact authors. Hey, you may decide to go to grad-school to study with them!
For your presentations, feel free to make slides of figures in the paper, from the authors web-sites, or to demonstrate software that you may have acquired from them. Don't forget to leave ample time for discussion, which may take place during your presentation or afterwards. If you have questions about your presentation, please get in touch with me.
Finally, provide me with a draft of your presentation at least 24 hours before you give it.