The quality of our discussions will rely on how prepared everyone is when they come to class.  It is important to do the reading in order to actively participate.  Students are required to submit two paper reviews per week (and their associated discussion points) for the assigned papers.  We'll usually read 3-4 papers each week; just choose 2 of those assigned to review.  In weeks that you are presenting, you can skip writing the reviews.

Each paper review should address most of following (in any order):

• Give a summary of the paper in your own words (very brief, 2-3 sentences)
• What is the main contribution of the paper?
• What are the primary strengths and weaknesses of the paper? 
  
• What is inspiring? (about the problem statement, the approach development, etc.)
  
• How convincing are the experiments?  If something specific is lacking, what should have been tested?
• Describe one specific way in which the work could be extended.
• Additional comments, including unclear points, connections you see between the papers
  

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See examples of well-written reviews from previous classes.  Keep in mind it's often easier to see flaws in a piece of work in hindsight, or judging from a distance -- yet we strive to comment on the good and creative things, too.

After writing your reviews, extract 2-3 "discussion points" based on your analysis.  These should be key observations, lingering questions, interesting connections, etc. that fall out of your full paper review.   Think of it as a recap of the most salient aspects of your paper review.  Typically this part should be about 2-3 sentences for each of the 2 papers you reviewed. 

Reviews and discussion points are due by 8 PM on the night before class (Tuesday). 

Submission: Please submit your review and discussion points separately via Piazza. 

To submit your reviews, which will by default be shared only with the instructor, please follow the following format:

1. New post - select type to be Note

2. Post to - select instructors (which is default)

3. Select folders - select tag of homework (hwX), where X is the week number.

4. Summary - Use title with prefix "[Reviews]".  The format looks like:

    [Reviews] hwX review by (your name)

5. Post the paper review in Details box.

To submit your discussion points, which will be shared with the entire class, please follow the following format:

1. New post - select type to be Note

2. Post to - select instructors (which is default)

3. Select folders - select tag of homework (hwX), where X is the week number.

4. Summary - Use title with prefix "[Discussion]".  The format looks like:

    [Discussion] hwX discussion by (your name)

5. Post your discussion points in Details box.

  Prior to class, we encourage you to browse the discussion point postings and (before or after class) share reactions on Piazza.

Paper presentations

 
Each student (or team, depending on the total enrollment) will give a presentation in class covering the selected papers on a topic selected from the course syllabus list.  This presentation should overview the papers and explain technical details, and synthesize any underlying commonalities or highlight interesting distinctions.

The talk should be well-organized and polished, about 15 minutes per paper.  Please run through it beforehand and check the time (a good rule of thumb: generally 15 minutes ~ target a max of 15 slides total).

• Clear statement of the problem
• Why the problem is interesting, important, difficult
• Key technical ideas, how they work, main contributions, strengths and weaknesses
• Evaluation, summary of key experiments and data
• How the technical approaches agree/differ
  
• Open issues raised in the papers, likely extensions

Try to use applications to motivate the work when possible, and look for visual elements (images, videos) to put in the presentation.  Check out the webpages linked on the class webpage, and also look at authors’ webpages for supplementary materials.  It’s ok to grab a few slides from conference talks etc. when available, but be sure to clearly cite the source on *each* slide that is not your own. 

 Here are a couple examples of good presentations from previous classes:  example1  example 2.

Experiment presentations

 

For each topic one person will present the results of some experimental evaluation of some main idea in a paper we read.  Basically the goal is to implement a distilled version of an essential technical idea in the paper, and show us some toy example of how this works in practice.  For many papers, you may be able to find code or binaries provided by the authors online (see links on our course page schedule alongside the papers).  The goal is to help us gain a more complete intuition about the work we are studying.  You might:

• Experiment with different types of datasets
• Perform an ablation study to understand the method's behavior more deeply
  
• Show a simplified example that highlights an expected strength or weakness of the approach

 

Note that the goal here is not to recreate published results or to build systems as described in the paper.  Instead, you are looking to make a small illustrative demo that will let us more deeply understand what we have read.  To avoid redundancy with the paper presentation, this presentation should not spend time explaining the methods of the papers; you can assume this is covered already.

Spend some time playing with your implementation, and put thought into what would be an instructive toy example to show the class.  The demo should allow us to learn something about the method, not just see it.  If you needed to implement something yourself, explain how you did it, and especially point out any details or choices that weren’t straightforward, in case others in the class can leverage your experience later when working on the project.  Be sure to explain the rationale for the outcomes, and conclude with a summary of the message(s) your example illustrates.

An experiment presentation should take about 20 minutes.  In your presentation, include links to any existing code, data, etc. you may have used.   

Here are a couple examples of good experiment presentations from previous classes:  example1  example 2.

 

 

Timetable for presenters:

By Wednesday the week before your presentation is to be given: email slides to Kristen and the TA, and schedule a time to meet.

The week of your presentation: refine the slides based on input from the instructors, practice, and check time length of the talk.

The day of the presentation: send final slides to Kristen and the TA.  We will post your slides online.

 

Projects

A project could be built around any of the following, and should be done with a partner:

• an extension to a technique we study in class
• an in-depth analysis and empirical evaluation of one or two existing related techniques
• design a novel approach and perform accompanying experiments
• a thorough survey/review paper summarizing and analyzing the work in a sub-area from the syllabus (this one only should not be done in partners)

Initial project proposals will be due before the middle of the term.  Details on the format will be given in class beforehand.