General Guidelines Regarding Papers

In this course, papers have two graded components.

Blog Posts

One blog post should be made for every paper assigned in the course.  Because this is done with every paper, it is not meant to be very burdensome.  You are asked to take a small amount of time to skim over the paper quickly, just enough to get the key points so that you know what the paper is about.  From this information, make a blog post according to the following format:

Citation

Include author list, paper name, publication information, and link to the paper (either a PDF or publication page).  This should be some standard, readable citation.  Google scholar can generate these for you if you search the paper name.

Summary

Your high-level description of the paper.  This does not need to be very long.  Just write a few sentences or a paragraph explaining enough about the paper that you will be able to remember it for later reference.  This paragraph should help you decide if you want to include the paper in your final report.

Discussion

Your impression of the paper.  This can include your thoughts on the method, what ideas it gave you, or anything else related to the paper.  This should be useful for you to peruse later as it may help give you ideas for your own project or remind you of some other, similar work you wanted to explore.

These posts will be mostly graded on completion, but you must put in sufficient effort to make it apparent that you have quickly read through the paper and would be able to talk intelligently about it.

Presentations

Everybody will need to present on at least one paper in this course.  Presentations are given at the beginning of class from the front of the room.  You should have some slides to augment your talk.

Presentations will be no more than 7 minutes in length, saving 3 minutes at the end for questions.  This allows for a maximum of 10 minutes per speaker.

This is primarily a completion grade since this is not a public speaking course.  However, it will be useful practice for you since you will undoubtedly (and may have already) present many research-related talks.  So please prepare appropriately so that you feel you can comfortably deliver a description of the paper and answer reasonable questions.