In this assignment, you will produce a written document that will
serve as your proposal for your final project. You will follow the format
of the document proposal.tex in the starter repository, which asks you
to answer a series of questions about your final project.
At this step of the project, you are producing a proposal document. I reserve the right to tell you the propose a different project if I do not believe your project has adequate scope for the class. Specifically, my feedback to you will include explicit verbiage on whether you are allowed to go ahead and proceed with your plans as described in the document, or whether you should make changes and resubmit the proposal.
Your final project is intended to be the open-ended part of the course, where you will have the opportunity (and expectation) to engage more deeply with some aspect of the machine learning field.
This is an attractive option if you are already engaged in research in your own field of study. Here, you will propose to deliver a project that will help you move your own work forward, and this project will involve machine learning in some sense.
Alternatively, you can find a recent paper from the machine learning literature (ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, FAT*, etc) and implement it yourself. Note that I will not allow you to choose a paper that has an existing, popular implementation (if the research project that led to the publication includes an implementation, then it’s unlikely that I will allow your project)
The literature in Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in ML has recently exploded, and it would be quite interesting to perform a study of the field based on natural language processing. This would likely be a combination of a literature review, some qualitative coding, and NLP techniques.
In collaboration with other colleagues, I have developed a Python package for comparing different ML algorithms with respect to their fairness properties. In this project, you would implement some recent “fair ML” algorithm, and integrate it with this Python package above.
Your proposal should be substantive and on-topic for a final project in this class (remember that I reserve the right to have you repropose). Nevertheless, this is the category for those of you with a burning idea in your head, on which you’d like to work on for a continued period of time.
The starter repository in this case includes a LaTeX file
(proposal.tex) with a skeleton of the document you will use to
propose your project. You will submit a file proposal.pdf compiled
from that document.
If you need help with LaTeX, please contact me sooner rather than later.