1. You will be expected to attend all lectures, and to complete all readings and assignments on time. There may be occasional homework assignments, and there will be a required term project.

2. Any homeworks will be announced in lecture. Therefore, be sure to get a classmate's phone number (for instance, 1 or 2 people sitting next to you in class, whoever they are!) so that you will not miss assignments in the unlikely event that you miss a class.

3. Email list:

   You will automatically be placed on an email list (a "Listserv") for the course. If you do not normally read email at the email address that UB has as your official address, please either do so for this course, or else have your mail forwarded. I will use this list as my main means of communicating with you out of class, and you can use it to communicate with the rest of us.

   You may send questions and comments that are of general interest to the entire class using the Listserv: Just send them to:

   cse663-fa06-list@listserv.buffalo.edu

   You can also send email just to me, at:

   rapaport@cse.buffalo.edu

   In any case, be sure to fill in the subject line, beginning with "CSE 663: " so that my mailer doesn't think it's spam.

   If you send email to me that I deem to be of general interest, I will feel free to remail it anonymously to the email list along with my reply unless you explicitly tell me otherwise.

   I will archive the emails at http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/663/F06/EMAIL/.

   For more information, read the Listserv Information webpage.

4. Just as you cannot expect to learn how to drive a car by reading about it or by watching other people do it, the same holds true for doing computer science. Do your work on time—this is one course you simply cannot cram for at the last minute, so don't even try! I cannot stress this strongly enough. The project, especially, may be fairly time-consuming, so please consider your other commitments, and plan your time accordingly.

5. Students should notify Prof. Rapaport within the first two weeks of class if they have a disability which would make it difficult to carry out course work as outlined (requiring note-takers, readers, extended test time).

1. The default term project for the course is to take a paragraph of text (in most cases, to be provided by me) containing an "unknown" word, to represent that passage in SNePS, together with any background information (including "rules") that would be needed to figure out ("compute") a meaning for that word. This is part of our Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition project.

2. Programming Languages, Lisp, and Unix:

   One prerequisite for this course is knowledge of any high-level programming language.

   But you are strongly advised to (learn and) use Lisp if you intend to do any research in AI. Moreover, there are good reasons to learn Lisp even if you want to make it in the real world of e-commerce; see:

   1. Paul Graham's Lisp Resources

   2. St. Amant, Robert, & Young, R. Michael (2001), "Common Lisp Resources on the Web" (PDF), intelligence 12(3): 21-23.

   3. ... and, especially, Graham, Paul (2001), "Beating the Averages".

   4. 
      You might also be interested in:
      Gabriel, Richard P. (1991), "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big"

   If you decide to use Lisp: The implementation of Lisp for this course is Allegro Common Lisp (acl), which runs under the Unix operating system. You will be expected to learn the idiosyncrasies of Allegro Common Lisp on your own (Shapiro's text should be of help). For more information on Lisp, see Marty Hall's "An Introduction and Tutorial for Common Lisp" website.

3. SNePS:

   We will discuss the SNePS knowledge representation and reasoning system in class, but those of you who do not already know it should work through the SNePSUL Tutorial and/or the SNePSLOG Introduction at

   /projects/shapiro/SNePS/SnepsIntro/intro.dvi as soon as possible.

4. You should have an account on the Grad Lab machines. If you do not have access to these machines, please let me know as soon as possible! You will be expected to learn how to use Unix, emacs, etc., on your own. CIT offers short courses on Unix, etc. To contact CIT:

   in person:	216 Computing Center
   by phone:	645-3542
   by fax:	645-3617
   by email:	cit-helpdesk@buffalo.edu
   on the Web:	http://wings.buffalo.edu/computing/Help-Desk/ http://www.cit.buffalo.edu/students/

5. Project Policies:

   • For your project, you will be expected to hand in a conference-style paper, typed or printed from a computer file, on 8.5 by 11 inch paper (stapled in the upper left-hand corner, and with your own title page [not the printer-generated cover sheet]), plus a well-documented listing of your program. (Please do not use folders or covers, unless your report is too thick to be stapled.) I strongly suggest that you learn to use Latex and ispell.

   • The intended audience of your project report is the person who will be continuing your project next semester, so the report should be self-contained and detailed enough to tell that (possibly hypothetical) person exactly what has been done, why, what problems were faced, how you solved them, what needs to be done next, and how to get started doing it.

     In the real world, you will be expected to write papers, either for presentation at conferences, publication in journals, or presentation to your boss or co-workers. No one reads computer programs except the programmer him- or herself, or someone else who has to modify the program. Users and other people want to read about the program, what it does, how it works, etc., and to see it in action. Consequently, the main product of your work is the paper, not the program! In the paper, you should say what you have done, and say (in English summary, not in programming detail) how you have done it. It should also include annotated examples of your program in action. These should be well chosen to illustrate the range of performance of your program. The examples should not be redundant, nor included merely because they look complicated. Each example should illustrate a particular ability of your program. Nevertheless, the reader will assume that your program does nothing interesting that isn't illustrated! To see an example of such a paper, you can read:

     Goldfain, Albert (2003), "Computationally Defining "harbinger" via Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition" [PDF].

     For this course, sample student term papers on CVA may be found at the CVA publications page.

     The program listing should either be presented as figures throughout the paper, or as an appendix. In either case, the listing is included as documentation for what you say in the paper.

     Thus, each report must consist of the following components:

     • descriptive title (not: "Project 1")

     • your name, the course number (CSE 663), & date due

     • abstract of project (a 1-paragraph summary)

     • description of the project (the body of the paper); for this course, the body of the paper should include the following:
       • brief description of the CVA project
       • brief description of your role in the project
       • your representation of the context containing the unknown word
       • the background information needed to compute a meaning for it
       • syntax and semantics of any new SNePS case frames used in the representation of the above information
       • the SNePS representations of the above
       • an commented/annotated transcript of your attempt to have Cassie compute a meaning.

     • list of references (if appropriate)

     • annotated sample runs (could be part of the description of the project)

     • commented code (could be as an appendix); for general guidelines on how to comment code, see "General Style and Coding Standards for Software Projects".

   • For general advice on how to prepare a written report, see my web page "How to Write".

For further information, see my web document on "How to Grade"

Incompletes:

For more information on Incomplete policies, see the Graduate School web page, "Incomplete Grades".

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: