Paper Reviews & Presentations Spring 2018

Paper Reviews

To facilitate productive class discussions, everyone must submit a review of each of the assigned papers to Piazza by 7am the day of each class. Each review should be written in prose, not as bullet points and should be its own Piazza private message that is tagged with the "Reviews" tag. The text of the review should be in the message itself. 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 be structured as follows:

• Paragraph 1 (summary):
  
  • What high-level problem is this work trying to solve? (as opposed to the specific technical hurdles that it overcomes)
  • Is it an important problem? Why or why not?
  • What are the work's main novel ideas or technical contributions? Be sure to describe them in your own words.
  • How does this approach compare to prior work?
  • How is the proposed solution evaluated?
• Paragraph 2 (+/-):
  
  • What are the work’s substantive strengths and weaknesses? (about the work, not the paper — i.e., not spelling, grammar, readability, etc.)
• Paragraph 3 (reaction):
  
  • What parts of the work did you find most striking and thought-provoking?
  • How would you continue this line of research? (i.e., what future work would you do in this area?)

Reviews of SoK papers should be structured as follows:

• Paragraph 1 (summary of area):
  
  • What high-level problem do all of the works being summarized have in common and are trying to solve?
  • Is it an important problem? Why or why not?
• Middle paragraphs (summary & +/- for each category of works):
  
  • What are the works' main novel ideas or technical contributions? Be sure to describe them in your own words.
  • How are the works evaluated?
  • What are the works’ substantive strengths and weaknesses? (about the works, not the paper — i.e., not spelling, grammar, readability, etc.)
• Last Paragraph (reaction):
  
  • What did you find most striking and thought-provoking?
  • 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 required papers will be presented by a student, and that student will lead the class discussion on the paper. Please sign up to present papers via the link shared on Piazza.

For paper presentations, you should prepare slides for a 15 minute talk. Please stick to this time limit so that there is time for discussion. The presentation should include:

• Paper name, authors and their institutions, and venue (e.g., conference) and your name on first slide
• Main technical contributions of the paper (if SoK, summary of contributions of each category of works)
• ≥10 questions for class discussion on final slide(s) in a proposed order — you’re the discussion leader.

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. Also, please post your slides to Piazza in PDF format prior to class.