Homework Overview

No.	Analyze a paper	Project
0	A0, A1, A2
1	A3	P1
2	A4	P2, P3
3	A5, A6	P4, P5
4		P6, P7
5		P8
6		P9

The homeworks refers to exercises related to two tasks, namely project and analyzing a paper. Individual exerises are described in rest of this page.

Analyzing a research paper

Each student is expected to write a critique of ONE paper and present its overview in the class. This homeworks will help us learn literature analysis skills towards starting a thesis or to simply understand a research paper.

A0. Identify the members in your team. Provide names, student ids, email addresses and web urls for each team member.
A1. Identify the paper P your team would present. Choose a paper which is already scheduled to be discussed in the course in weeks 4 thru 14. Identify the team member responsible for 2000 word narrative on the selected paper. Identify the team member responsible for preparing 10 transparecies and the oral presentation in lecture.
A2. Identify two other papers say Q and R. You team will peer-review presentations prepared by other teams on Q and R.
A3. Submit 3 printed copies and an electronic copy (plaintext or other standard format files) of the narrative and slides. Do not use vendor specific file formats (e.g. powerpoint). Electronic copy will be linked to the web-page for the course to make those available to the audience. Paper copies will be distributed to reviewers to provide feedback. The written critique should be about 2000 words long and the oral presentation should consist of about 10 transparencies addressing the following questions:
- Problem statement: Formally define the problem addressed in the paper. Briefly explain the significance of the problem in context of our course.
- List the major contributions of the paper. Which do you think is most significant and why?
- What are the key concepts behind the approach in this paper. Provide simple explanations of those. Also provide a couple of simple exercises for the audience to check their undersanding of the key concepts.
- What is the validation methodology used in this paper? Describe the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology. Why did authors choose this methodology?
- List the assumptions made by the authors. Critique an assumption that you believe is unreasonable.
- If you were to rewrite this paper today, what would you preserve and what would be revise? Briefly justify.
A4. Review the presentation on papers Q and R using the following criteria: technical accuracy of review, presentation (easy to understand, examples), analysis and insights beyond the paper summary available on textbook web-site. You are expected to submit two paper copies and an electronic copy of your 500 word narrative summarizing the findings as well as a list of 3 to 4 specific improvements.
A5. Revise your presentation on paper P using the feedback from reviewers. Prepare a 500 word narrative summarizing the revisions for suggested improvements from reviewers. Place the revised presentation and narrative on the web and ensure that the course web-site has a link to your material.
A6. Submit two questions to test the understanding of key concepts in P in a closed-book examination. Attach model solutions to each questions. Each question should be answerable in 10 minutes. Questions should be problem-solving in nature with a unique answers.
A7. Make a 30-minute oral presentation in the class on paper P.

Project/Term-Paper

Each person is expected to write a term paper or carry out a design/implementation project. The ideal process should have the following steps:

P1. Define possible questions, i.e. preliminary proposal outlining areas of interest based on the examination of textbook and course material. The question should be related to a topic covered in the course but not completely addressed by the papers in the reading list.
P2. Identify key sources, types of evidence. Include a list of sources. The potential source for the paper is a recent conference proceedings or a journal in the database area. Students should visit library, web (e.g. DBLP, ACM DL, IEEE DL) and fellow students specializing in the database research area, to check the availability of the sources before listing them.
P3. Summary of key readings. This summary is more than a list of summaries for individual research papers using the hints in the section on analyzing a research paper. A possible approach is to find a common abstract problems adressed by all the paper and develop a simple classification system to compare the solutions proposed in individual papers. Look at the "literature survey" sections of the papers in the reading list (particularly the thsoe from ACM Computing Surveys) for examples.
P4. Possible outline or overall structure for paper / project. Do include a justfication comparing and contrasting your proposed paper / project with the summary of key readings. There should be a clear statement of the new aspects of your work. Look at the "literature survey and our contribution" sections of the papers in the reading list for examples.
P5. Formal proposal : Includes questions or thesis, key resources, and proposed structure revised with feedback from peers and the instructor. The proposal should list a methodology to valiate the claims made in the contributions section. Choose a methodology similar to the ones used in the papers in the reading list. For example, experiments, analytial methods, case study, detailed illustrative examples, prototyping and demonstration of new capability, etc. There should be a clear plan to list the steps within each methodology. For example an experimental methodology should include a description of the experiment design listing the candidates to be compared, metrics of performance, values of fixed parameters, valuesets for variable parameters, benchmark datasets and computations, key assumptions, etc.
P6. Rough draft. Follow the outlines from the research papers covered in the course. For example, the draft may have 5 sections:
- Problem Statement, Significance of the problem
- Related Work and Our Contributions
- Propsoed Approach
- Validation of listed contributtion (experimental, analytical)
- Conclusions and Future Work
P7. Review the list of class projects. You will be assigned two class project to review.
P8. Review the assigned course projects. Use this review form . You are expected to submit 500 word comment to authors including a list of 3 to 4 specific suggestions for improvements.
P9. Revise your project using the feedback from reviewers. Prepare a 500 word narrative summarizing the revisions for suggested improvements from reviewers. You may also discuss what would I do if I were to redo the paper?. Place the revised presentation and narrative on the web and ensure that the course web-site has a link to your material.
P10. Oral presentation in the class using 10 to 15 transparencies.

You are expected to visit office hours of the instructor and meet with your peers for insuring timely completion of various steps since the progress of your peers depends on you.

Sample Projects/Term-Papers

Sample projects and terms papers are available from project-list.