RLAI Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence (RLAI)
Graduate Project - Literature Review

The deadline for turing in your literature review has been set at Tuesday December 14th

The goal of this project is produce a document that provides an overview of an aspect of reinforcement learning that is interesting to you.  The topic choice will be up to you, but you should discuss it with Dr. Sutton before committing to it to ensure that it is appropriate. 

There will be time available on the day of the midterm (Nov 4) for students to meet with Dr. Sutton and discuss their ideas.  You should have some idea about your topic before this day.  We'll only have 5-10 minutes per student, so the idea is to help direct your ideas, not to give you an idea.

The final document should be between 10-20 pages, single spaced, 12 pt font.  This page limit will be enforced.  We expect that it is well written, with proper citations/references, etc.  Your research should reference at least five papers that you have read and understood.

You will be marked primarily on three things: 1) the set of papers you chose (can you search the literature on a topic and find the most relevant papers), 2) the quality of the document (how well it is written), and 3) how well you understood the topics discussed in the paper (as reflected in your discussion of them and how they interrelate.  For the intended audience of the paper you should take your fellow RLAI students.  They have read the book and are familiar with what is there.  Now take them into a new part of the literature.

Below, we're going to try and provide a list of vague, brainstormed ideas that you may find interesting.  This list is by no means exhaustive, bring you own if you have any!

Literature Review Ideas:
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If anything is unclear, or if there are questions - please ask as soon as possible so that we can get the project details finalized.

-Brian
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We also have to do a literature review for 603. Assuming that this is on an appropriate RL topic, can we use the same review for both courses?
Or does the review have to be a unique project just for this course? 

Well, yes and no.  You can't really do the same work and use it to satisfy two requirements.  But you could do two related things, or do a larger, longer review that would be used for both purposes.  --Rich Sutton Nov 9 2004

Seeing as you're both at NIPS on December 14th, does that mean we can actually take another week?? 

A: You might think so.  We couldn't possible say.

Just wondering what the official word is in regards to the due date of the literature review. We didn't really get any sort of definitive answer to the previous query. 

plz give some extension.  

Rich: The reviews were generally good. I will be returning some individual comments to you in some form. But one error was made by almost everybody made, so I'll discuss it here for all. Most of you made you citations in the poor style that is common in much technical writing, in which bracketed numbers are used, such as [7], as opposed to names and dates, as in (Smith, 1980). The bracketed numbers are poor style. What do you expect the reader to do, thumb to the back of the article each time to know what you are talking about? In some cases that may be ok, as when the material is purely supporting background and the specific source is not relevant. But most of the time, in science (and particularly in a literature review), you actually want the reader to know what reference you are referring to, as well as give credit, and the proper way to do both is to give the author and year.

A related error that many made was to use a citation as part of a sentence, as in "In [2] it was shown that...". Never do this. Use citations only parenthetically, as side comments. A simple test of this is that the sentence should remain grammatically correct if the citation were removed.

In short, I strongly recommend to you that in all future work you use the APA format for your citations. Complete guidelines to this format are given at http://webster.commnet.edu/apa/parenthetical.htm