Please see the bottom for comments added after the semester began.
The presentations and wiki postings should have two parts: an objective overview of the paper and a (subjective) reaction to the paper.
The objective overview of the paper should describe the following. You cannot include all the details that are in the paper; you will need to abstract away from some details. The presentations will include more information than the Wiki postings.
- The point of the paper: what is the problem addressed? what are the goals and claimed contributions of the paper? This should be written with care. It should be an abstractive rather than an extractive summary.
- Method/methodology
- Data and evaluation
- Conclusions summarizing the contributions of the work (may be omitted from the Wiki postings)
- Comparison to related work. You may see an interesting connection to papers previously covered in the class. Or, you may feel this work is superior or inferior to papers previously covered.
- Thoughts about ways in which the work could have been improved
- Thoughts about ways to build on the work
- Critique of the work, including its conceptual framework, methodology, and/or results
- Describe something you don't understand that you would like the class to discuss (explain exactly what you don't understand and what is not clear in the paper)
I highly recommend reading The Task of the Referee by Alan Jay Smith (IEEE Computer 1990). For the class, the section entitled "Evaluating a research paper" is particularly relevant. This section raises several questions to ask yourself as you read a research paper.
The Wednesday presentations should be 25 minutes for the subjective and objective parts (together) and then 12 minutes for discussion.
Here are some additional comments (I will add to these as the course progresses). Presenters: please try to engage the class during your presentations. Your presentation should not just be slides of bullet lists. That is a boring presentation style (though one many people use, but not presenters everyone enjoys). Also, you should develop the authors' intuitions during your presentation instead of passively reporting it. That way, you can bring the audience along with you.
In your subjective reactions (both the Wiki postings and presentations), go beyond the paper itself in one of the ways listed above. Please be sure that your reactions are sufficiently substantial that the presenters have something to work with, and so we have the basis for fruitful discussions. A pretty boring comment is something like you would like to have seen another analysis or another experiment. Why do you want to see this? What interesting hypothesis do you have r.e. what would be learned from that analysis or experiment. Think big! If you want to say you like or dislike something, elaborate. Why do you like it? Why is it important from a research perspective? What larger issues is it related to? Etc.
Please do not make your reaction essay composed entirely of criticisms of the paper. Those are valuable, but perhaps more valuable is to find something interesting in a paper and think about how to extend it, tie to some other research, link it to a larger issue, what we learn from the paper, how it could be used in an application, and so on.
The only way to modify your wiki postings is in the comments, because otherwise the presenters will have to keep checking for different versions and to see if the page has changed. However, if the presenters and you agree that posting a revised version would be helpful to them (because the comments got confusing for example), you can post a new version to your page.
The original syllabus said that your contributions should be no more than 800 words. It turns out that this is too limited, so the 800 word upper bound has been removed.