CMPS/CMPE 200 -- Fall 2016

Homework 4
Due: 11am, November 8, 2016.

Objective:

Description:

For this assignment you will provide a review/critique of a technical paper.

In technical conferences and journals, the peer review process is critical and ensures that the content of submitted papers is technically correct, the approach is sound, the results are convincing and reproducible, the contributions are important and novel, etc. This is also the place where one tries to provide constructive suggestions on how the paper can be improved. In this way, the research community can rely on the validity of published works to advance their field of research. While paper reviews are considered part of the professional service one offers to his/her profession, it is also a critical piece in conducting research: it is an opportunity to learn about leading edge developments in a given field and think beyond what's reported in the paper.

Your job for this assignment is to act as a reviewer for a technical paper. Since most of you probably have not had the opportunity to review a non-published paper before, you will review (or critique) a published paper (for the purposes of this assignment).

Address the following questions about the paper (the first 6 are fairly standard questions). Put your response to each of these questions under: Confidential remarks for the program committee of the reviewer form (see Submission instructions below).

• Provide a brief summary of the paper.
• What are its strong points and main contributions?
• What are its weak points?
• Are the approaches technically sounds?
• Comment on the experimental methodology used in the paper (if applicable).
• How is the organization and presentation of the paper?
• Describe an idea on how you might improve upon the work reported in this paper, or how it might inspire you to apply the findings into another application, or generalize it to a broader formulation, etc.

Submission:

We will be using the EasyChair conference system to manage the review process. It is a real conference system that's used for managing paper reviews.

We have already uploaded a number of papers for you to choose from. You need to review just one of these papers (answering the questions listed above). After you have submitted your review, you can also read other reviews of the paper. In this way, you can calibrate your review of the paper with those of your peers. This can be a good learning experience as well.

• Signup for an EasyChair account. Everyone who is registed in the class has already been added into the EasyChair conference that is set up for this assignment: CMPE/CMPS200-2016. However, each of you still need to signup for an EasyChair account. Be sure to use your @ucsc.edu email during this process.
• Decide which paper you want to review and bid on it. There should be a tab on top called "Paper Bidding". When you click on it, the page should show a list of 6 submissions for you to choose from. After reading the abstracts of the papers, you click "yes" next to the paper you want to review. That paper should then be highlighted with a bluish color. This indicates that you have made a bid (reservation) on the paper. We want to have more or less the same number of reviews for each paper. So, there is a limit of 30 bids on each paper.
• Prepare and submit your review. Under the "Reviews" tab, click on "All papers". You should see the list of 6 papers again. Click on the "add new review" icon for the paper that you bidded on, and enter your review. Be sure to complete and submit your review by the deadline for this homework.

Resources:

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