Project Milestones
Project Milestones
Why are we doing milestones? Just like the historic milestone shown on the right, my goal is to help keep you and your group on track and from getting lost!
Milestones will be due approximately every 2-3 weeks throughout the semester. They count towards your final project grade (this also keeps you from having one massive item due that is 40% of your grade!) and my goal is to give you feedback to help you stay on track.
Note that in addition to the descriptions below, rubrics for all projects are available on canvas.
Project Milestone Deadlines
- Week 4: Project Proposal (oral), Final project groups formed
- Week 7: Project progress report 1: Related literature
- Week 10: Project progress report 2: Preliminary results
- Week 13: Project progress report 3: New results
- Week 16: Final presentations, Final paper
Project Milestone Details: Project Proposals
- Proposals will have two parts.
- Part 1: In-class SHORT presentation (1 slide max) that tries to sell your idea to the rest of the class. No groups are required for this part but, if you have already made a group, you are welcome to present together.
- Part 2: SHORT (1 page max) writeup to canvas that lists your group members and briefly describes your planned project, including where you think you can get your data.
- Remember: your project just needs to explore an area of ethical AI for Earth Sciences in depth. Graduate students require some degree of novelty to their project (e.g. not just recreating another paper) while undergraduates are not required to have novelty to their project. The proposal should specify what is novel (if any).
Project Milestone Details: Related Literature
- Your next milestone focuses on your related literature. Although Ethical AI for Earth Sciences is relatively new, there will still be related literature to explore, either in the AI/ML methods that you are choosing or the application area for Earth Sciences. This checkpoint will focus on identifying at least n related papers where n differs based on the number of students and their class enrollment. n is cumulative:
- n >= 2 for 4083 students
- n >= 3 for 5083 students
- Thus a group of two 4083 and one 5083 student would have a literature total of 2 + 2 + 3 = 7 papers to find
- Please write a short (one paragraph) summary of each paper and cite each paper appropriately. APA or MLA or some other standard citation method (I am not picky but you should know how to use a citation manager by now and I expect you to give me formatted citations and not just a URL!).
- In your summary of each paper, say:
- What the paper is about
- How it relates to your project
- At the end of the literature review, please include a final paragraph describing how your literature review has changed your project plans. This is expected to happen, it is totally normal in research to adjust your plans based on what you find in the literature, especially if you suddenly found someone who is doing precisely what you proposed to do. I don’t expect that here but I am going to assume that you will have found something that causes you to adjust your projects somehow.
Project Milestone Details: Preliminary Results
- Your next milestone focuses on preliminary results for your project. If your project is a proposed policy, this may not involve actual graphs but I assume the majority of you will be doing projects that are not policy related, as thus will have results to show. If you are doing policy, then you can show your current policy progress and what you are basing each of your recommendations on (note that policy projects will rely VERY heavily on related literature!).
Project Milestone Details: New Results
- “Second verse, same as the first. A whole lot louder and a whole lot worse” (random karma bonus if you know where that comes from without searching it on the web)
- This milestone builds on the previous one with new results and hopefully any issues you had before have been overcome.
Project Milestone Details: Final Presentations
- Your final milestone are the final project presentations in class. These are done as a group. The total time allotted will be based on the final number of groups we have (I want to make sure we can do them all in one day). This will be updated once project groups have finalized.