Reading, Reviews & Presentations

READING, WRITING AND PRESENTING PAPERS

READING AND ANSWERING QUESTIONS

We will be reading two or more papers per week. The papers will be first presented to the group by one or more students and then discussed in a round-table manner.

To ensure lively discussions, you will be responsible for reading the assigned papers before each class. As reading enforcer, you will write a short critique of the main assigned paper for each class. The introductory lecture and the associated material covers some useful material.

Today, many of the papers have a video of the author’s conference presentation. Take advantage of this and watch it before attempting to read the paper.

WRITING CRITIQUES

Before each class, you must submit a short critique of the required readings on Canvas (about 18 critiques). Critiques will be accepted until 11:59pm the night before class.

The critique should include a summary of the paper, as well as one to three sentences on the paper’s strengths and weaknesses. The remainder of your critique will focus on one or two key points such as: the paper impact on the field, open questions, missing experiments, relation to previous work, future directions, and ideas or thoughts it provoked. There are prompts on Canvas to help frame your critique. As you read the paper, keep in mind that it is always possible to find flaws in a paper, but it will be far more interesting and rewarding to focus on the paper’s strengths.

PRESENTING

Most class meetings will be centered around a paper presentation and discussion. Each student will be responsible for presenting one or two of the papers in the schedule (so, if you haven’t yet, please email me three ranked options).

Giving a good presentation is hard work. Please make sure to allocate enough time to prepare for yours.

There are some good pointers around that you may want to look at.

In general, your presentation should include the following key sections:

  • Introduction: Context and motivation for the work (why they did this?). Any background that you think the audience needs to understand the paper.
  • Methods: The methods that were used (how they did it?)
  • Results: The results obtained; the work main contributions (what did they find?)
  • Discussion: An interpretation of those results (what does this mean?)
  • Critique and class discussion: Your job as presenter is to not only present the paper, but to primarily lead class discussion of its strengths, weaknesses, and broader implications. To help focus the class discussion, end your presentation with a list of about three major questions/issues worthy of further discussion.