PC1 — The Project Pitch

PC1 is due Wednesday, 1/29 at noon.

An important aspect of project formulation is pitching your idea to a stakeholder. No matter how good an idea you might have, you must be able to convince a stakeholder of the value to be added if your idea is taken to fruition.

You will work with your group of up to 8 members to create a slide deck that consists of a presentation no longer than five minutes.

Specification

Your goal is to formulate an exciting project idea to work on this semester. With your group, come up with a creative application that can leverage Conversational AI to solve a problem.

The project pitch is a description of a problem, current shortcomings in existing solutions, a proposed solution, and an assessment of value added once the project is completed. You will create a slide deck that describes all of these, and you will deliver a 5 minute presentation in class.

Resources

You can use this template slide deck as a starting point. You don't have to follow it exactly. Feel free to explain your project however you think is best.

Commentary

Based on your project pitch, you will receive feedback from the instructors and IAs. This pitch does not have to be given by all members of your team--one oft-forgotten challenge is time management. With only 5 minutes to make your case, does it make sense to delegate a subset of your team to give the presentation instead of everyone?

Hints

A lot of Conversational AI deployments rely on human-in-the-room thinking. What things would you talk about with a human helping you? What steps are discussed while solving a problem or accomplishing a task? For example, what things would you ask a teller if you wanted to withdraw money from a bank account? By thinking of a human-in-the-room, you can gain insights about the appropriate scope for a project idea.

Previous groups have used Google Slides to produce slide decks. You are welcome to do so, so long as you turn in a PDF version of the slides.

Here are two examples from last semester that were well-received.

• OnionFinder A grocery store assistant
• REMI a recipe assistant

These example slides have had names redacted.

You are given a great deal of leeway in constructing your presentation. Don't feel constrained by the template slide deck!

What To Turn In For PC1

You will turn in a single .zip file containing only two files:

• teamX.pdf, containing your group's pitch slides.
• group.txt, a file containing each member's uniqname (and nothing else) on each line, in any order.

Grading Rubric

PC1 Grading (out of 10 points):

• 2 points — Clarity of presentation materials
• 2 points for clear, well-organized, structured, numbered slides; clear and relevant figures
• 1 point for adequate slides
• 0 points for missing slides, poor organization, missing slide numbers
• 5 points — Presentation oration
• 5 points for clear, projected speech that is demonstrably rehearsed
• 3 points for good speech, not too much stumbling
• 1 point for unclear speech, unrehearsed, questionable organization
• 0 points for poor, low speech, no engagement with audience, poor time management
• 2 points — Scope of idea. Is the pitch adequately ambitious? Does the project accomplish something exciting?
• 2 points for a well-articulated, exciting idea that is scoped appropriately for a semester-long group project
• 1 point for projects that are overly ambitious or not ambitious enough
• 0 points if you propose an advising assistant #justkiddingnotreally
• 1 point — Submission
• 1 point for submissions that contain (1) a single PDF, and (2) a plaintext file with all group member uniqnames
• 0 points if you submit anything other than a PDF or if you do not include an appropriately-formatted member list