This artifact is a project poster that I made for CS 221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. For this project, my group and I had focused on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to predict the price of a house based on its attributes such as number of rooms, square footage, location, etc. We used this poster to present our research results to professors, teaching assistants and other students during the class symposium.

CS 221 was the first class I took that had a final project component, so this was the first time I had to complete a fully-fleshed research endeavour with teammates. As a result, I learned a lot from the project as a whole, and looking back at this artifact after having taken several other project-based courses, there are a few things that I would have done differently.

The first lesson I got from this poster is space management. It was very hard to fit a whole quarter’s worth of work on a single poster board, and I remember that we had to make choices on what to include and what to leave out. We initially wanted to include all our results, but eventually had to only leave the most impactful ones. We spent a lot of time trying to organize our poster according to the classic research format (abstract, data, models, results, and discussion) as well as focusing on the story of our message. I was very proud of the fact that our color choices (taken from the Stanford Identity Website) reinforce our ethos as members of an academic institution.

Looking back at this artifact almost two year later, I think that the main point of improvement is our use of text relative to visuals. As it currently stands, this poster works well as a standalone piece and can be understood without much oral presentation. However, since we were primarily using it in the context of a symposium, I wish that we had spent more time cutting back on some of the text to make space for more visuals. For example, we tried a lot of different approaches for this project, all of which are in some way related to the others. Visualizing them as a tree or a graph would have been a very useful aid to our explanations of the process we went through.

This project was completed in collaboration with Jesus Cervantes and Alex Kim.