How to write and submit your review for CS511?

Although the purpose of your reviewing is not to decide whether the paper should be accepted for publication as they were already published, the reviewing process is similar. A good review should ideally include comments on all the following aspects:

  1. What (research) problem(s) does the paper attempt to address? Is the problem an important problem, and who would care about the solution?
  2. To what extent, does the previous work have already addressed this problem? And how does this work advance the state of the art?
  3. What are the major technical contributions? For example, did the authors propose a completely new method? Or did the authors propose a completely new way of looking at things? Sometimes, a paper would propose "yet another solution" to a problem that is only slightly better than previous solutions; such work is often called "incremental work" and generally wouldn't be regarded as a milestone. It is unlikely that you will need to review such a paper for this class as the papers you will need to review are all major milestones which presumably represent major breakthroughs.
  4. How well does the proposed solution solve the problem?
  5. What is the potential impact/benefit of the work? That is, how would the contributions of this paper change the world?
In order to write such a review, you clearly need to have a fairly good understanding of the main points made in the paper. In fact, when you read a research paper (or carry out your own research), you should always keep these questions in mind. Always try to think critically about a point/argument made in a paper; do you really agree with what the authors said and is the argument really solid without any flaw? Such critical reading/thinking would help you tremendously in identifying weakness in existing work thus also opportunities for improving the existing work. Your review does not have to be very long; your review just needs to include a couple of sentences to answer each of the 5 questions listed above. Please be as specific as possible. For example, instead of just saying something vague such as "this paper has proposed a novel technique to solve problem X", add details such as "The main idea is to use A ....; because ..., this gives a better solution to X". Or better, you can say something more concrete in the first place, such as "this paper has proposed to use A .... ; this method differs from the previous methods in that .... ; because ..., this gives a better solution to X".

Please post your review to the class newsgroup "class.cs511" before the corresponding class.