Item | Quantity | Portion of Grade | |
Exam | 1 | 30% | |
Homeworks | 6 | 5% | (1% each, drop lowest) |
Small Projects | 2 | 10% | (5% each) |
Technical Paper Assignments | 1 | 10% |
|
Class Participation | 5% | ||
Large Project | 1 | 40% |
During roughly the first half of the semester, we will cover most of the first fourteen chapters of the textbook, as well as outside readings (on grammatical evolution, artificial life, neuro-evolution, etc.). You will have homeworks and small projects based on this material and this portion of the course will conclude with an examination. During this portion of the semester, you will also begin to individually explore papers from the primary, peer-reviewed literature on advanced topics in ANNE, and you will begin to develop ideas and find background material for your large project (see below).
During roughly the second half of the semester, you will present papers on advanced topics in ANNE and complete large projects based on these topics. The large projects will consist of several components, including a topic paragraph, references, a proposal, status reports, code, data, analysis, a report, presentation materials, and presentations. This portion of the semester will conclude with presentations on your large projects.
All homework, exams, small projects, and technical paper reviews and presentations in this course are to be done ALONE; the work submitted by a student MUST be the student's own.
Group work is not required for the large projects but it is allowed. Students will select their own groups and each group will give specific roles and tasks to its group members.
You are responsible for the material covered during the lecture sessions, whether or not it is also found in your textbooks or other assigned reading materials. Similarly, you are responsible for the material found in your textbooks and other assigned reading materials, whether or not it is also covered during the lecture sessions. In other words, you are responsible for the UNION of these sources of knowledge, as depicted by the entire shaded region of the Venn diagram below, not merely their intersection (the darkest shaded region).
You may write your programs from scratch or may start from programs for which the source code is freely available on the web or through other sources (such as friends or student organizations). If you do not start from scratch, you Individual or must give a complete and accurate accounting of where all of your code came from and indicate which parts are original, which are changed, and which you got from which other source. Failure to give credit where credit is due is academic fraud and will be dealt with accordingly.
All work must properly cite sources. For example, if you quote a source in one of your technical paper reviews, you must include the quotation in quotation marks and clearly indicate the source of the quotation.
Late assignments will be penalized 20% per day late. (All parts of days will be rounded up.) After five days, you will not be able to turn in that assignment for credit. If you are worried about turning in the assignment late and loosing points, turn in the assignment ahead of time. You will be turning in electronic and paper copies of group projects. It is the electronic copy that must be turned in by class time on the day that it is due. The paper copy is due twenty four hours after the electronic copy. The paper copy may be submitted in class or turned in during office hours or by slipping it under my office door.
All exams will be open book/open notes. NO electronic devices will be permitted in the testing area.
Copying another's work, or possession of electronic computing or communication devices in the testing area, is cheating and grounds for penalties in accordance with school policies.
Please see the University's web pages on academic integrity.