CS 573: Paper Summaries

An important component of this class will be the careful reading and analysis of the papers to be presented. You are required to write a summary of each paper, which will be due at 12:01 AM (that's one minute past midnight) on the day the paper is to be presented. The summaries are to be written on a web-based form; there is a link from the course calendar to the summary form for each paper.

Unfortunately, due to the number of people in the class, it isn't practical for me to grade all of the summaries. I will grade the first three, so you can get an idea of what I'm looking for early. I will grade as many more as I can, to be picked throughout the semester. In general, I'll try to grade at least one summary from each "block" of papers.

In filling out the summaries, here's what I'm looking for on the form:

(1 point) What is the topic of this paper?

What is the paper about? For instance, "this paper discusses the Linux Second Extended File System." Simply quoting the title of the paper will not be an acceptable answer to this question.

(2 points) What is the problem addressed by the work reported on in the paper?

What, specifically, is the problem being addressed by the author? An example would be, "existing Linux file systems were severely limited by maximum file name length, file size, and file system size. They also didn't support full Unix file system semantics (particularly regarding time stamps) and had low performance" Note: a frequent mistake is answering this question with something of the form, "the author is writing a paper about...." I want to know about the work here, not the paper. A second common mistake is an answer of the form, "Since they wanted to (do something), they solved the problem by..." I really want people to learn to focus on one thing at a time: the solution to the problem is two questions later.

(2 points) Why is this problem important?

Who cares? Why did anybody feel like they should address the problem? This can vary from commercial reasons (a frequent reason for new processors in CS 573), to purely theoretical issues.

(3 points) What is the solution?

Here is the core of the summary: how did the author approach the problem? What are the essential features of the solution?

What I want here is a brief (less than one page) description of the most important features of the solution. This will take a lot of judgement on your part in discerning what is important, what is detail, and what is mere fluff. In most cases, details like bus cycle times, names of circuit technologies, and the number of bits devoted to a given field in a word are details that really don't matter.

And again, I don't want an outline of the paper here. I want you tell me about the research.

(1 point) Is this approach successful?

Time to evaluate: does the work meet the author's stated goals?

(1 point) Where should this research go next?

Time to be original: does this paper end up suggesting anything to you regarding future work? I prefer answers that don't come out the the "Future Work" section of the paper, and that aren't unduly informed by hindsight (saying after VAX that DEC should go on and develop Alpha is an example of "too much hindsight").

The remaining questions are more for my curiosity, as I refine the selection of papers every semester.