Reactions to Research Papers

Students in the graduate version of the class will read a research paper each week other than the first. You must submit a reaction to the assigned paper for the week on Gradescope by 11:59pm each Monday. Late paper reactions will receive no credit. Reactions 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?
• 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. We generally expect that projects will be done individually. By 11:59pm on each of the following days, you must submit the following as a Campuswire private message (visible only to instructors) that is tagged with the "Project" tag:

• Tuesday, January 18th: 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.
• Monday, January 24th: Submit a finalized version of your project proposal that also includes a timeline with checkpoints and deliverables at those checkpoints.
• Monday, February 14th: 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.
• TBD (during exam period): Give a 10-minute final project presentation to the course staff.
• Friday, March 18th: On Gradescope, 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.