Why This Group?

The mastering of literature is important to a proper research. Skills like paper reading, reviewing, presentation and understanding talks/discussions are also critical to a successful researcher. However, it is difficult for a person to acquire these skills alone. Therefore, we help each other in this reading group to improve all the above-mentioned skills by reading, reviewing, presenting and discussing papers together.

What Do We Do in This Group?

We will have two types of meetings:

• Regular meetings: held once every week that would have 3-4 presentations each. All the presenters are required to provide a slide set (for a 20-min talk), a review of the paper he is going to present. The topic of the paper is not limited. Participants are required to write a review for each paper that is going to be presented.
  
  
• Conference-oriented meetings: when a participant is going to a conference, we can read the papers in that conference which are of interest. If we have questions, the participant can also help us contact the author (and/or ask the questions) on behalf of us. This kind of meeting are usually held 1-2 weeks before a conference and will have 2 meetings per week. Since conference-oriented meetings are quite intensive, slides and reviews are not mandatory (but preferred). However, a presentation (of about 15 minutes) is required for each paper to introduce what is proposed.

Here is a checklist of what to do for each meeting:

Prepare for A Meeting

Select a paper

In a regular meeting, you can select whatever paper that interests you. It is preferred if the paper is accepted by a top conference and is well written. A full paper is preferred over a workshop paper (or a short paper). Please do not select posters or demo abstracts (or PhD forum abstracts). Theses or dissertations can only be selected in special conditions (and agreed by all the participants).

In a conference-oriented meeting, you are supposed to choose a paper on in the targeted conference. For the participant that has a paper accepted by the target conference, you can select your own paper (but you need to prepare a slide set and use it as a mock presentation for the conference).

Prepare a talk with a slide set

For a full paper, you usually have 20-25 minutes in a conference (15-min for a workshop paper). Exceeding the time is usually seen as a disrespect of the audience. We will do the same here.

You need to prepare a slide set for no longer than a 25-minute talk. Usually, you would use 1 minute on each slide (except the animation pages) therefore the slide set should be no more than 25 pages. If you have too much material to cover, pick only the most important ones, and put details in the appendix slides for the explanation in Q&A session.

Please note that nobody should interrupt a talk therefore a slide number for each page is a mandatory so that the audience can write down the questions with the page number and ask them at the end of the talk.

Write reviews

Here is a review Template:

'''Overall merit''': [Accept (top 10%) | Weak accept (top 30% but not top 10%) | Weak reject (top 50% but not top 30%) | Reject (bottom 50%)  ]\\
'''Confidence''': [Expert | Knowledgeable | Some Familiarity | None]\\
'''Quality of writing''': [Excellent | Well written | Not well written | Poorly Written]\\
'''Summary of the paper''': (Provide a 1-2 sentence summary of the work in your own words, including the contribution and technical depth)\\

'''Strengths''': (Be brief)\\

'''Weaknesses''': (Be brief)\\

'''Detailed comments''':\\

During The Meeting

Give the talk

Discuss based on reviews

Electronic devices are NOT recommended during the meeting

Before You Start: Register Your Own Page

Register a student page in the wiki

• Type in the browser address bar: http://mobilityfirst.orbit-lab.org/wiki/Internal/StudentPages/<YourName> (Replace <YourName> with your first name]
• Create the page and make sure it is under Internal/StudentPages/
• Write something about yourself. You will put all your reviews and slides in this page later (see Internal/StudentPages/Jiachen for example)
• In case you don't know how to use Wiki formats, you can check the WikiFormatting and WikiMacros

Create a link to your page in Internal/StudentPages

• Edit Internal/StudentPages

Recent Events

2016.09.06

• Event page
  
• Description: ICN'16 reading session 1
  
• Participants: Haoyuan Xu, Jiachen Chen, Sugang Li, Wuyang Zhang, Ying Liu, Zhenhua Jia
  
• Summary: This is the summary of the meeting

Past Events