Reading Reviews

Students in the graduate version of the class will read one or two research papers each week. You must submit a "review" of each of the assigned papers for the week to Piazza by 10:30am each Friday. Each review should be its own Piazza private message that is tagged with the "Reviews" tag. After class on Fridays, all of the reviews will be made visible to other students in the course. Late paper reviews will receive no credit. Reviews should consist of three brief paragraphs of prose (not bullet points) in your own words using approximately the structure listed below:

Paragraph 1 (Summary):

• What problem did this work attempt to solve?
• Is this an important problem? Why / why not?
• What are the main ideas and technical contributions of the work?
• How does this approach compare to prior work?
• How is the proposed solution evaluated?

Paragraph 2 (+/-):

• What are the work's key strengths?
• What are the work's key weaknesses?

Paragraph 3 (Reaction):

• What parts of the work did you find most striking and thought-provoking?
• What future work might you consider in this line of research?

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Research Project

Students will work on a major and novel research project in groups of two students or three students. We will suggest some projects, but you may also propose your own. By 5:00pm on each of the following days, you must:

• Friday, October 12th: Submit a rough draft of your project proposal (1 to 2 pages). The proposal should state your research questions; hypotheses (if any); general approach; and evaluation metrics.
• Each group will be assigned one of the three course instructors as their primary contact and shepherd for the project. Project groups will meet with that instructor to refine their idea.
• Friday, October 19th: Submit a finalized version of your draft project proposal that also includes a timeline with checkpoints and deliverables at those checkpoints.
• Friday, November 2nd: Submit a written progress report. Your written progress report should describe your progress to date relative to your proposed timeline, note any problems you have run into, describe your updated plan for the rest of the quarter, and include any preliminary results or technical accomplishments. This written report should also include a draft related work section for your final paper.
• Friday, November 16th: Submit a second written progress report following the same format as the first.
• TBA: Give a 15-minute final project presentation.
• Friday, December 14th: Submit a conference-style paper including an abstract, introduction (including research questions), related work, methodology, results, discussion, references, etc.

Students are encouraged to submit their project to a conference with an appropriate deadline. A paper submission will likely require additional work after the end of the quarter. Your final paper should be written in a style suitable for publication at a conference or workshop. The conference papers in the readings provide good examples of what a conference paper looks like and the style in which they are written. Papers should follow the sigconf template available as part of the ACM LaTeX template. However, your report for the class need not adhere to any particular conference's page limits.