| April 2 |
Due: April 5
Go to this form and enter the email address I should use to share google docs with you. Once, I've shared the paper summary submission form with you, confirm that you can access the paper review site. We are using HotCRP, a standard paper review system. You'll use it to submit all your paper summaries.
Sign up for papers by entering your name on one row of this spread sheet. First come, first serve.
| Deliverable | Succeed in handing in future assignments. | Due: April 5 |
Due: 9pm the night before class.
This course is discussion-based, so it is essential that you read the papers and come to class prepared to discuss. The purpose of these reviews to ensure that you do so and provide some structure to how your approach the papers.
Reading research papers critically is an essential skill that you need to develop in graduate school. It will serve you will regardless of what kind of job you end up with. There have been several articles written about how to about this. As your first excercise (in this course, anyway) in reading and synthesizing several articles on a subject, take a look at these three: one, two, three.
You will submit your paper reviews via this paper review site.
You do not need to submit summaries for papers that you present as part of assignment 2.
| Deliverable | Your paper reviews submitted via the review site. | Due: 9pm the night before class. |
In place of a mid term and final exam, you will prepare a presentation for two of the subjects we will be covering in class. There are several motivations for this:
Since your presentation will cover an important part of the course's material, it is important that you do a good job. To help you accomplish this, the presentation is broken down into several parts spread out over several weeks.
A note about the deadlines. Once you have been assigned a day, it is your job to track the deadlines for the milestones that precede your presentation. I am not going to track you down asking to see your slides. If you do not get them to me by the deadline, your grade will reflect it.
Attendence during classes with a student presenter is extremely important. You should only miss class if it is absolutely necessary.
Important: The goal here is to provide you experience in becoming an expert on a topic. This is a difficult task, and this is a learning experience. If you get stuck looking for some key piece of information, come talk to me. I can probably point you in the right direction.
Grading for presentations:
Due: First week of class
Look at the course schedule and select the days you would like to present. Assignments are first-come, first serve.| Deliverable | none. | Due: First week of class |
Due: Two weeks prior to your presentation
Make an appointment with me no more less than two weeks before your presenation day to discuss the topic. I will point you in the direction of extra readings, etc. that you should look at.
To ensure that we meet early enough, you should drop me a line about the meeting at least several days in advance.
| Deliverable | none. | Due: Two weeks prior to your presentation |
Due: One week before your presentation
Read my guide to giving good talks.
To prepare your slides, you should become an expert on the subject you are presenting. This means you should read papers in addition to the ones listed on the course web site and in addition to the ones I give to you during our meeting.
A goal to strive for is to be able to answer any question that someone might ask after reading the assigned papers. At the very least, this means you should have tried to find answers to all the questions that arose in your mind while reading those papers. You should also have good answers to most of the questions suggested in the guides to reading papers that you read at the beginning of the quarter.
Once you have become an expert on the subject, you need to condense all the information about the papers into about 45 minutes worth of slides. Typically, slides take about 1-2 minutes each. Use that value as a guide, but also practice presenting the slides to see if that guideline holds for you.
You don't need to spend too much time recounting the papers' contents, since everyone has just read it. You should briefly review it to make sure that everyone is on the same page and to give people an opportunity to ask questions about those aspects of the paper. Your contribution, and where you should spend most of your time, is in the extra analysis, data from other sources, and synthesis you do for the talk.
Spend time thinking about the slides and pay attention to the following issues:
It is also useful to have all the figures, pictures, and tables from the paper in your slide deck. They can just be at the end as backup slides if you don't want to include some of them in main part of your presentation. They are useful as discussion aids in class.
| Deliverable | Your slides in either PowerPoint (OpenOffice is fine), Keynote, or pdf format. | Due: One week before your presentation |
Due: The day of your presentation
You will present your presentation during the second half of class. As usual, we will collect a set of questions about the material that you will look into and present answers to during the next class meeting.
| Deliverable | Upload your slides to the course slide repository. | Due: The day of your presentation |
Due: The class period following your presentation
Find answers to as many of the questions we raise in class as possible. This may mean reading some extra papers.
| Deliverable | Update your slides in the course slide repository to include the answers to the questions. | Due: The class period following your presentation |