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Project Descriptions\\
\Large\bf
15-782: Artificial Neural Networks\\
Dave Touretzky, Spring 2004\\[.2in]
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Students enrolled in the graduate version of the Artificial Neural
Networks course (15-782) are required to do a project in addition to
the other assignments.  Students taking the undergraduate version
(15-496) are not required to do a project, but may elect to do one if
they wish, in which case it will be included along with exams and
homework when calculating their grade.

Four choices of project are offered, as described below.  Each student
doing a project will be assigned a mentor, either the instructor (Dave
Touretzky) or the TA (Kornel Laskowski), with whom they should meet
periodically to discuss their progress.\\

\noindent{\bf Important dates:}

\begin{itemize}

\item March 29:  project selections due.  Email the instructor with your
choice of project.  If pursuing a self-designed project, you should
have met with the instructor or TA to discuss the design.

\item April 12: progress report.

\item May 3: projects due.
A brief writeup must be included along with the code, describing what
was done and the results that were obtained.

\end{itemize}


\section*{Project Choices}

\subsection*{1. Simple Recurrent Network}

Implement an Elman-style simple recurrent network, and train it on a
small context-free grammar.  Use principal components analysis to
reveal structure in the trained network's hidden unit representations.
(Matlab contains built-in routines for PCA.)

\subsection*{2. Dynamic Arm Model}

Reproduce the dynamic arm model described in the Jordan and Rumelhart
paper, \emph{Forward models: Supervised learning with a distal
teacher.}  Note that Homework 4 involves reproducing the kinematic model.
To reproduce the dynamic model you will need to adopt their technique of
creating a second controller to ``bootstrap'' the neural net controller.

\subsection*{3. Helmholtz Machine}

Implement a Helmholtz machine as described in the two papers in the
April 8 lecture.  Reproduce the vertical and horizontal bars
experiment.  Create a new experiment of your own design and show how a
Helmholtz machine solves it.

\subsection*{4. Ad Lib}

Design a project of your own, perhaps related to your current research
area.  Details must be worked out with the instructor before the
project can be approved.


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