Mentored Undergraduate Research Challenge: Playing Word Association Games
Challenge Details
The purpose of the mentored undergraduate research challenge is to provide undergraduate students exposure to the complete research life-cycle through the guidance of a mentor familiar with the research life-cycle. The research life-cycle includes all the steps from identifying a problem, to hypothesizing solutions, to implementation and experimentation, to ultimately reporting results in a written publication.
Participating teams will submit a manuscript of their research project for peer review. Teams with accepted papers will have their submission published and presented. The specific venue at which teams will submit will be announced at an upcoming date; please check back at this website for more details.
Research challenge teams must include:
At least one undergraduate (including community college) student,
At least one mentor (faculty or with a Ph.D.),
Anyone else, but the undergraduate student must be involved in the majority of the research and the mentor must provide regular guidance to the team.
The objective of this year's challenge is to perform and publish research on playing word association games similar to Apples-to-Apples. The project should be doable within one semester or summer---be sure to keep the project simple and doable, addressing a single question if your problem is large. There are many possible projects in this understudied area of research; some examples include, but are not limited to:
Which word card from a list of options is best associated with a target word?
For a particular player who is judging, what is their definition of 'best' association?
When judging, how does a bot portray their definition of 'best' to others?
How could a bot playing a social game be transparent about its decisions and models?
And more! Check out Project Ideas below to get some inspiration.
Submission deadlines and the peer review timeline will follow those of the venue at which the challenge will be hosted.
Accepted papers will be presented at the venue. .
Specific dates coming soon.
Registration
If you have a team who is interested in participating, then please contact Rick Freedman (rfreedman at sift dot net) with:
Team member names,
Team member e-mail addresses, and
Note who are the undergraduate(s) and mentor(s) on the team.
Why register your team?
Non-commital: registration is not a requirement to participate, but it lets the organizers know your team is considering participation.
"Customer service": if your team has any questions about the challenge, then we can do our best to answer them.
Updates: we can send teams updates about the challenge, including new resources, timeline changes, and deadline reminders.
Program committee: to provide peer reviews to all submissions, we need to form a program committee of researchers familiar with undergraduate research. If we can estimate the number of submissions, then we can make sure our program committee is large enough to avoid reviewing delays. It would be appreciated, but not required, if team mentors are also willing to serve on the program committee and review other teams' submissions---there is no conflict-of-interest because this is a challenge for undergraduates to experience the complete research life-cycle, not a competition for the best research.
Resources
We plan to share more resources as they become available. If you have any relevant resources that you recommend, then please send them to Rick Freedman (rfreedman at sift dot net) for consideration. Disclaimer: None of these resources are endorsements or advertisements. The organizers identified these as useful materials and are sharing them for educational benefit.
Code-Related
Dr. Jeremy Blum kindly created an open-source platform for this year's challenge, available on GitHub. It is not required to use this code for the challenge, but those who do will be able to participate in games with other teams' agents. The software is written with a server-client setup so that teams may use whatever language they like as long as it supports programming sockets for message passing. The current client available is in the Python programming language. If you develop an additional client in a different language, then we are happy to provide a link to it. Please contact the organizers if you need a client in a particular language as well, and we will do our best to help.
Research-Related
Many references are listed in the AI Matters article for this year's challenge, but additional resources about both the topic and undergraduate research are listed below:
CRA's CONQUER website - Resources for faculty and undergraduate students interested in research, graduate school, and research careers in computer science.
Far from a complete list of things a team could research, but the first step in the research life-cycle is to observe the world and come up with some questions you want to answer. Check out the videos below for some related research projects and video-inspired questions to get started brainstorming. What will your team investigate?
More Coming Soon!
What sort of decisions does an AI bot need to make when playing Apples-to-Apples? How can the bot justify each of those decisions?
How does an AI bot communicate its interests for others to understand judging preferences?
How can an AI bot determine whether two words are sufficiently related?