Paper Reviews & Presentations Spring 2015

Paper Reviews

Prior to each class, everyone must submit a review of each of the two assigned papers to HotCRP. Reviews on HotCRP are visible to other students in the class, and you're encouraged to read other students' reviews before class.

The review of each paper should be short (~400 words) and have the following structure:

1. In the first paragraph:
   1. State the problem that the paper tries to solve; and
   2. Summarize the main novel ideas or technical contributions of the paper (i.e., what will we remember five years from now?)
2. In one or more additional paragraphs:
   1. Evaluate the paper's strengths and weaknesses;
   2. Discuss something you would have done differently if you had written the paper; and
   3. Suggest one or more interesting open problems on related topics.

Paper Presentations

During each class, each of the two required papers will be presented by a student. Please sign up to present papers via the link on Piazza.

For paper presentations, you should prepare slides for roughly 15 minutes. You may use figures from slides of talks given by the paper's authors, but you should include attribution, and in general, the talk and slides should be your own. The presentation should include:

1. Paper name, author/institution, and venue (e.g., conference)
2. A paper summary
   1. Problem statement
   2. Main ideas
   3. Technical details (diagrams are helpful)
   4. Summary of any evaluation performed (graphs are helpful)
3. Your opinion
   1. Strengths
   2. Weaknesses
   3. Ideas for future work
   4. Topics for discussion