Seminar papers and short presentations: Students will be asked to write a fifteen-to-twenty page paper on a topic of their choice approved by the instructor. A non-exhaustive listing of possible paper topics may be found at sampletopics07.htm. Students should contact the instructor early in the term to discuss appropriate paper topics. This is especially true for those who intend the paper to satisfy their law school writing requirement. Whatever paper topic a student chooses, a student should plan to develop an extended specific example to illustrate his/her point.

NIPS (which stands for "Neural Information Processing Systems") is an annual conference on machine learning and computational neuroscience, and papers presented there reveal what experts in the field are working on. Conveniently, you can find the data from the 2015 conference from Kaggle's NIPS 2015 Papers page. Let's load the data downloaded from Kaggle to the current folder. I also wrote a script nips2015_parse_html in order to parse the HTML file "accepted_papers.html" We can visualize which organization the authors of accepted papers belong to using graphs.