Reading Assignments

In this course, we will hand out weekly reading assignments. Those consist of two parts:

  • All students are tasked to read the assigned papers every week and write a 1-2 page reflection for two of the papers they select. Your reflection should cover the main aspects as outlined in the template below. Submit your reflection (submit a hard copy, printed double sided) during the class time by the due date. The total score is 1 point per paper. The reading assignments contribute 20% of your overall grade. Late submissions will not be permitted.

  • Four students will be assigned each week to present one of the papers each, during the lecture time at the due date. The names of the students assigned will be published on the course website on Moodle every week. These presentations should be no more than 20 minutes for each of the papers and contain sufficient content for all other students to understand the gist and main outcomes of the presented paper with the goal to enable discussions in the classroom.

    We will take attendance during the presentations to ensure that we have a full room for the presenters. Presenters are not required to submit written paper reviews during the week of their presentation.

If you would like to learn more about on how to read a scientific paper, you may want to first read one (or all of) the following articles:

Below is a possible template for your paper reviews. Feel free to use it as a starting point for your submissions.

# Paper Title

## Your name (last, First)

## Summarize the (at most) 3 key main ideas.

## State the main contribution of the paper (technical merits)

## Critique the main contribution (technical limitations)

1. Rate the significance of the paper on a scale of 
   - 5 (breakthrough) 
   - 4 (significant contribution)
   - 3 (modest contribution)
   - 2 (incremental contribution)
   - 1 (no contribution or negative contribution)
   Explain your rating in a sentence or two.

2. Rate how convincing is the methodology: do the claims and conclusions follow from 
   the experiments? Are the assumptions realistic? Are the experiments well designed?
   Are there different experiments that would be more convincing? Are there other
   alternatives the authors should have considered? (And, of course, is the paper free of
   methodological errors?)

3. What is the most important limitation of the approach?

## Rate the writing in the paper 

Do this on a scale of 5 (great) to 1 (muddled), and justify your ranking.  Did you
have to re-read sections?  Were algorithms clearly explained?  Did the paper have a logical flow?

Add your comments, opinions, and discussions. What did you learn? What did surprise you?

## Answer one of the following questions 

Answer the question whichever is most relevant for this paper: 

- What lessons should system researchers and builders take away from this work? 
- What is the lasting impact of this work? 
- What (if any) questions does this work leave open?

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