Paper Reviews & Presentations Spring 2016

Paper Reviews

To facilitate productive class discussions, everyone must submit a review of each of the two assigned papers to Piazza by 6am the day of each class. Each review should be its own Piazza private message that is tagged with the "Reviews" tag. The morning before each class, all of the reviews will be made visible to other students in the course. You are expected to read other students' paper reviews before class. Late paper reviews will receive no credit.

In this class, we'll be reading two types of papers: research papers presenting novel results and "systemization of knowledge (SoK)" papers, which summarize existing work in a particular area.

Reviews of research papers should answer the following questions:

1. What high-level problem is this work trying to solve? (as opposed to the specific technical hurdles that it overcomes)
2. Is it an important problem? Why or why not?
3. Is there prior work in the area? If so, why is it insufficient?
4. What are the work's main novel ideas or technical contributions? (i.e., what will we remember five years from now?)
   Be sure to describe them in your own words.
5. What are the work's strengths and weaknesses?
6. How is the proposed solution evaluated? Is the evaluation reasonable?
7. How would you continue this line of research? (i.e., what future work would you do in this area?)

Reviews of SoK papers should answer the following questions:

1. What high-level problem do all of the works being summarized have in common and are trying to solve? (as opposed to the specific technical hurdles that they overcome)
2. Is it an important problem? Why or why not?
3. The works being summarized are typically categorized. For each category of works:
   1. What are the works' main novel ideas or technical contributions? (i.e., what will we remember five years from now?)
      Be sure to describe them in your own words.
   2. What are the works' strengths and weaknesses?
   3. How are the works evaluated? Is the evaluation reasonable?
4. How would you continue the major lines of research summarized in the paper? (i.e., what future work would you do in this area?)

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 shared on Piazza.

For paper presentations, you should prepare slides for a talk of roughly 15–20 minutes. The presentation should include:

1. Paper name, authors and their institutions, and venue (e.g., conference)
2. Answers to all of the same questions as a paper review
3. Topics for class discussion

You should be able to explain the work in your own words, and the talk and slides should be your own. You may, however, use figures from the paper or from slides of talks given by the paper's authors as long as you include attribution.