Background

Reading research papers is a main activity that you'll find yourself spending much time on during your graduate study. Learning how to read them effectively is therefore very important. Here are some links to various paper reading methods that other researchers find useful. I encourage you to read them, try them out, and develop one that works the best for you.

• How to Read an Engineering Research Paper by William G. Griswold. The take-home message is that until you can answer a bunch of questions, you are not done reading a paper.

• How to Read a Paper by S. Keshav. Advocates a three-pass approach to understand a paper to different levels.

• How to Read, Write, and Present papers by Nitin H. Vaidya. It includes general advice on how to pick what to read.

Review and Submission Instructions

Each paper review is due before each class. You need to hand in a hard copy of the review to the instructor. Each review should include the following sections:

1. Problem (< 5 sentences): What is the problem the paper addresses? Why is it worth solving? Why are existing solutions not good enough?

2. Meat (< 5 sentences): What are the technical nuggets that make this paper cool? In another word, what are the challenges and how do the authors address them?

3. Evaluation (< 3 sentences): How do the authors demonstrate that they have solved the problem? Do you have doubts on their claims?

4. Improvements (< 3 sentences): What would you have done differently? For instance, can you think of better approaches to solve the problem? Or if you are not convinced by the evaluation, what different methods would you use? Or if you are not excited about the problem, explain why.