Paper Review
Before each class, you must submit a short review of the required readings. Reviews will be accepted until 11:59pm the night before class. No late submission will be accepted. You need to submit at least 10 reviews during the semester, which includes at least one review from each of the four topics.
The review should be structured around the following 3 key areas:
Scope/Relevance: What problem is the paper trying to solve? Why is the problem important?
Contributions/Strengths: What are the key technical ideas? What sets it apart from prior work?
Limitations/Weaknesses: What are the main areas of improvements and open questions?
Presentation
The class will take the form of a “role playing” paper reading seminar, based on suggestions from Alec Jacobson and Colin Raffel. You will sign up to play one of the following roles: paper author, peer reviewer, archaeologist, academic researcher and industry practitioner.
The paper author can either do a solo 15 min presentation, or a joint 20 min presentation with another presentor. The hacker role should do a 10 min presentation, while all other accessory roles do a 5 min presentation.
Paper author
You are the author of the paper who is presenting your work at an academic conference. In your talk, you should probably address the following:
- Why should people care about your work?
- What are the key technical challenges and insights?
- How did you evaluate your hypotheses?
- What are the main takeaways from the project?
Archaeologist
This paper was found buried under ground in the desert. You’re an archeologist who must determine where this paper sits in the context of previous and subsequent work.
- Prior work archaeologist: survey 2-3 older papers that substantially influences the current paper.
- Follow-up work archeologist: survey 2-3 newer papers that are heavily influenced by this current paper.
Academic Researcher
You’re a researcher who is working on a new project in this area. Propose an imaginary follow-up project not just based on the current paper but only possible due to the existence and success of the current paper.
Industry Practitioner
You work at a company or organization developing an application or product of your choice (that has not already been suggested in a prior session). Bring a convincing pitch for how the method/system in the paper could fit into products and workflows at your company, and discuss at least one positive and negative impact of this application.
Hacker
You’re a hacker who needs a demo of this paper ASAP. Implement a small part or simplified version of the paper on a small dataset or toy problem. Prepare to share the core code of the algorithm to the class and demo your implementation. Do not simply download and run an existing implementation – though you are welcome to use (and give credit to) an existing implementation for “backbone” code.