There are two main goals for a project in this class:
(1) You should learn a significant amount about your chosen project topic. This will involve closely and carefully reading literature on your specific project topic (likely to be a paper or two). You'll demonstrate this aspect of your project in the "Background" section(s) of your project report, which should be a clear synthesis and exposition in your own words of what you learned. You can format this according to the scribe notes of the class -- basically, for this portion of the project you should turn in a polished and high-quality set of scribe notes, as if you had been the scribe for a lecture on your chosen topic.
(2) You should gain research experience in this area; i.e. make a serious effort to contribute to the state of knowledge on your project topic by (i) identifying an interesting open question or direction for future research related to your project topic; (ii) coming up with an approach to make progress; and (iii) working to carry out your approach. You'll demonstrate this aspect of your project by explaining in detail what you did for (i), (ii) and (iii) in the rest of your project report.
The timetable for projects will be as follows: TBD
For the first phase of your project (the initial proposal) you should not only select a general topic, but come up with a clear idea of the sources you will use and the specific material within those sources that you will cover.
The end products of your project will be:
(A) An in-class presentation. You should expect to give a 15-30 minute presentation on what you did. This is not much time so good preparation for your presentation is a must. The scribe note portion of your project should cover much more material, and in more detail, than you will be able to get through in your presentation.
(B) A project report that you'll turn in to me (Rocco). As described above this will consist of a scribe note component and an original research component. This will be the major component of your course grade and should reflect your best effort.
You may work alone or in pairs on the project. Expectations for projects will be calibrated according to group size.
Below are some potential project topics with associated references to the literature. You are encouraged to make up your own project topic, but check with me very early on to make sure your project topic is OK -- i.e. that it is sufficiently relevant to the course topic, and that we're not going to cover it in the lectures. Good places to look if you are browsing/brainstorming for ideas are COLT (Conference on Computational Learning Theory) proceedings or journals such as Machine Learning or Journal of Machine Learning Research. There are also many learning theory papers that appear in more "mainstream" CS theory venues such as the STOC (Symposium on Theory of Computing) proceedings, FOCS (Foundations of Computer Science) proceedings, and journals such as JACM, J. Computer & System Sciences, SIAM Journal on Computing, Information and Computation, and others.