• Extend and expand on your midterm project using NEAT.
• Apply IAC to a robot with a richer sensory set, such as camera images using the Aibo, the Pioneer, or a simulated robot.
• Reconfigure IAC by replacing the splitting memory with an unsupervised categorization mechansism such as the RAVQ or GNG.
• Reconfigure IAC by replacing the experts within each region with a monolithic expert (as described in the footnote at the bottom of page 269).
• Explore self-teaching networks as described by Nolfi and Floreano in the paper Learning and Evolution that we discussed in week 5.
• Try the SODA approach described in the paper on Developing navigation behavior through self-organizing distinctive state abstraction by Provost, Kuipers, and Mikkulainen that we will discuss next week.

You can see examples of last year's projects at CS81 Spring 2008. Your project proposal should be at least two pages long. It should include a clear description of:

• The developmental architecture you will be testing.
• The environment and robot you will use in the experiment.
• Your hypothesis and expected outcome.
• How you will analyze the results to demonstrate that some kind of development has actually occurred.

Be ready to demonstrate your robot and environment for the class during the week of April 7. Your experiment not need to be completed at this point, but be prepared to describe the developmental architecture you will use, your planned experiment, and your hypotheses.

You should plan to give a 30 minute presentation about your project. Each group will be assigned a date to speak during the last two weeks of April. It may be the case that you are still running experiments at this point. However, you should have some preliminary results to report. If it is a team project, then each team member should speak for an equal portion of the time. You can use openoffice, which is available on the CS system, or powerpoint to create your presentation. You should follow these guidelines (put together by Tia Newhall) when creating your talk.

Your paper should include the following:

• A short abstract of 200 to 300 words summarizing your findings.
• An introduction that contrasts your study with other related work. Find and read at least three articles related to your experiment and discuss these papers here.
• A detailed description of your experiments. There should be enough information so that someone could reproduce your experiments.
• An explanation of the results. Use figures and tables where appropriate.
• A discussion of the significance of the results.
• A bibliography.

Your grade will not be based on whether or not your experiment succeeds. Negative results are also useful. Your grade will be based on the design and execution of the experiment as well as the thoroughness and readability of the paper. You do not turn in any programs. Email me a pdf version of your paper.

The purpose of writing a research paper is to communicate your discoveries to others. It is important to explicitly acknowledge how your work relates to other work. This can be done either with a direct quotation from another source or by summarizing the key points from another source. You should avoid paraphrasing another source as this can border on plagiarism. When summarizing another source, explain the essential information in your own words.

When using the exact language from another source, you must use quotation marks. Or if you are using a passage that is more than four lines long, indent and single space the passage without quotation marks. For a direct quotation, provide a reference with a page number. When summarizing another source, you should also provide a reference, but a page number is not necessary.