Welcome to the class!
This year I'll be running CS294-43 as a reading seminar in conjunction with my group meeting. We'll cover a subtopic of object and activity recognition each week, reviewing a number of key papers in the field.
Weekly Readings
If you look at the syllabus link to the left, there are quite a lot of papers listed. It's a long list, but I think all are really essential reading to stay abreast of this rapidly moving field.
If you are taking the course for credit, I'll expect you to try to read all of them--I realize this is a significant load, but there are no exams or projects in the class (aside from presenting your current research). It's fine if you do not understand everything in detail, but you should at least be familiar with the overall content and claims of each paper, and be prepared with key questions for each paper if you don't really understand one of them, or with critical summaries to explain key points if you do. If the material is new to you, focus on the early papers, and just skim the later ones; if you are already experienced in an area, do the reverse. Together with the lead student presenter for each week, I will cover slides for each paper, and will lead a discussion of the ideas and merits of each.
If you are not taking the course for credit, I still expect you to give each paper a quick read before each meeting, and will feel free to publicly embarrass anyone who is unprepared.
Lead discussions once during the term
Everyone has to present once during the term, leading the discussion of the papers for a particular week, and help be the "discussant" for another week, preparing a critical analysis of the papers on a particular day.
Please see the syllabus on the left, and sign up for the topic you would like to present. I'll help each of you with the presentation, and will obtain slides for you to use in some cases, and/or videos from the CVPR site. You'll not be expected to prepare a presentation from scratch for all these papers! But I do expect you to undertand them all, and be able to explain them (with my help, and the help of the discussant) enough to lead the group discussion.
Please feel free to suggest alternate papers, or topics. Of course, it's a zero-sum game at this point with such a full syllabus, and we'd have to cut a paper for every one added. But I may well have missed an important paper on my list, or picked a paper which is dominated by another recent work.
Be doing some relevant research you can discuss at the end
If you're taking the class for credit I'd like you to also make a short related research presentation at the end of the term, this can be your ongoing research effort, or a project joint with another class, that involves some topic we covered.
No class on the 21st, or just before the ICCV deadline
We'll not be meeting on the 21st--normally I would just be covering this administrivia, and reviewing the syllabus, and going around the room with introductions. We'll do introductions on the 28th, and will dive right in with the readings for Global Features. We will also skip the class right before the ICCV deadline.
See you on the 28th! Feel free to email me with any questions, and/or use the google group forum.