A typical class will consist of the following elements
Discussion of the core reading on Piazza before class.
Discussion and finalizing of the review by the reviewer (about 20 minutes).
Brief introduction and overview by organizer (about 10 minutes)
Discussion of 1-2 assigned core papers by the reviewer (about 25 minutes)
Presentation of 1-2 additional papers by a Presenter (about 20 minutes), e.g. UC Berkeley papers will only be presented not reviewed.
We expect the following class participation
Each class: everyone reads at least the core papers and makes at least two comments on the piazza discussion board. Optionally people should add suggested improvements for the review.
Everyone acts at least once during the term as Reviewer which means presenting a paper and writing a review of it.
Organizer take care of a single class, w.r.t. topic selection and leading the class in consultation with the teachers of the class. Organizers are typically experienced graduate students and PostDocs.
If not being an organizer, one should also act at least once as a Presenter, which means presenting the paper in detail, so people can follow the paper without having read it.
Some guidelines for participation on Piazza:
Please don't just summarize the paper but instead try to discuss the paper.
Some possible criteria for how to evaluate papers:
What might be the limitations of the approach and its assumptions: where might it fail, even if all of its components work as intended?
What might this paper have done that was previously impossible?
What are broader take-aways from the paper that can be applied elsewhere?
What's the most important part of the paper or the method?
Do the experiments justify the paper's argument?
Remember: criticizing, especially in hindsight is easy; it's more difficult, but equally important, to identify the good aspects of a paper.
The following workflow will be used for the core papers:
The Reviewer posts a full review on piazza. This is due the Thursday 23:59 before class.
Everyone posts at least two comments on the discussion board for each paper. This is due the Sunday 23:59 before class.
The Reviewer adapts the review, taking the comments from the discussion into account before the class starts.
Further points might come up during the discussion in class, which the reviewer integrates
A final iteration is done between reviewers and teachers.
Teacher posts finalized review on the blog.
The reviews should be written in a narrative format (3000-5000 characters), answering the following questions. Also, look at previous reviews on the blog:
What does the paper do? (very, very short summary, 1-2 sentences)
How does this fit into the context of other work?
Strength: What are the contributions/impact?
Weaknesses: What could be improved? Where does the paper fall short?
Who should read it? (target audience? how accessible is it? maybe less explicit)
What insights can we provide from our perspective?