General Information

30% of the over-all grade.

Critical reading and presentation are two essential skills, and this assignment is designed to give you an exercise in these skills. The presentations should be about 1 hour in length, followed by 15 minutes of in-class discussion. There will typically be two student presentations per class.

Depending on the number of students in the class, each student will give one or two presentations over the course of the semester.

Requirements

Your grade will be based on your understanding of the material presented in the paper, as well as on the clarity of your presentation. You should present the motivation and the technical material of the paper clearly. To encourage critical reading, we also ask that you include a slide summarizing the impact of the paper, and its strengths and weaknesses. Be prepared to lead a discussion of the paper based on this slide, and also to clarify any of the paper's technical material if there are questions.

Slides for some of the papers may be available on the conference website, or on authors' homepages. You may use some material in the slides, modifying them as you see fit. However, be aware that most conference presentations are about 20 minutes in length, while your presentation should be 1 hour in length, and so you will need to include more material. If you use the authors' slides, be sure to "make them your own" -- you must understand what is presented on each slide and be able to explain it clearly.

Before you present your paper in class, you may make an appointment with Julia or Susan during our scheduled office hours to go over your presentation.

Paper selection

You may make your bid to present a paper by sending an email to cis650@cis.upenn.edu. You must submit your bid by 2:30pm on September 15. Papers are assigned on a first come - first served basis, so the earlier you make your bid -- the higher your chances that the paper is still available. When making your bid, you may include up to 6 papers, ordering them by your preference, and we will attempt to make fair assignments based on when we receive your bid.

Julia Stoyanovich jstoy@cis.upenn.edu