Reading for Research

I believe there are three pillars of research: specific content expertise, broad knowledge of the field, and an ability to identify relevant problems that need to be solved. (I’m still thinking for a catchy three-word phrase for this.)

You’re developing specific expertise in Machine Learning by taking this course. You are learning to identify relevant problems by adding to your Money List. And now we will work on broad knowledge by regularly reading publications in the field of computer science.

I’ve collected several good links on the class GitHub Page under the heading Research. For this assignment (which will repeat regularly, maybe every 2 weeks or so), you should read some articles and choose one to present to the class.

The presentation will usually be very informal – we’ll just go around the room and ask you to stay at your seat and give us a quick summary. Tell us what the article is about, what problem they’re solving, what motivated them, and what their solution is. Know the article well enough to give specifics and respond to questions.

I know that this kind of self-directed reading is one of the very best ways to get inspired to learn more about a field and to find new problems to solve. I also hope that your brief presentations to the class will help inspire the rest of the class. We’ll all hear about a dozen different new results in computer science. It should be lots of fun!

Specifically for next week, please select one article from the links above and be ready to tell us about it on probably Monday. All the links are good, but the first one (Communications of the ACM) might be the best one-stop-shop. It depends on what you like, though.