Course Participation

Students are expected to attend course sessions and participate in discussions and in-class activities. In addition, each student will be resonsible for helping design one class session: finalizing choices of readings, providing a short summary presentation, and leading the class in related discussion and/or activities. Assignment of students to topics and dates will be coordinated during the first week of the course.

We understand that students may be out of town certain weeks for conferences or may need to miss sessions due to illness or high-priority deadlines. Please message the course staff to let us know about dates you can not join the course.

Leading a Discussion

Slides are due by 9:00am the day before each class.

Students will work together (typically in pairs) to present the papers in this course. Each class will have a student presenter team who will collectively cover the assigned papers for that class.

As a presenter, you should assume that your classmates have all read the assigned papers before class. Instead of going through the assigned papers from beginning to end, your role is to contextualize the assigned papers and situate them within the literature, as well as to do a deeper dive into the key ideas and contributions of the assigned papers. After preparing your presentation, you should not only be an expert about the assigned papers, but also knowledgeable about the broader area that those papers are in.

Concretely, your presentation (roughly 20-30 minutes long) should have two components:

• Context. Read a few papers that are prior and/or concurrent work, and, if available, a few papers that came later and build upon the ideas in this paper. Share any background information that you think will help your classmates better understand the assigned readings. Summarize the broader landscape (as described by these papers) and situate the assigned papers within these works. For example, your presentation might answer the following questions:
  • What is the driving motivation of the paper?
  • What was the state-of-the-art before this paper? What was the prevailing view about this issue?
  • What are the key contributions made by this paper? What was the insight or method that allowed them to make this contribution?
  • How did this paper change how people think about this issue? How has future work built on top of it? Has this paper made a difference yet (or not)? Why or why not?
• Deep dives. Pick one key aspect of each assigned paper that you’d be interested to discuss in depth. This could be a system or interface design, an experiment, an argument, etc. Go over it in detail, for example:
  • What is the setting?
  • How did the authors approach the problem?
  • What are the results? Did they support the claim?
  • Which details in their experiment, assumptions, argument etc. matter most?
  • What did you find interesting about this?
  • What might the paper have done differently?
  • What new directions or opportunities does the paper open up?

These questions are just examples; they might or might not be appropriate for your given assigned paper.

The deep dives should be done separately for each of the assigned papers. The context can be shared or not, depending on the papers; this is up to you. Within the pair of presenters, you may choose to allocate the sections however you wish, but each person should speak for approximately half the time. We strongly encourage you to jointly discuss and create the presentation.

In addition you will then be responsible to help moderate discussion. While we expect all students to be engaged and come prepared with questions and comments, you are encouraged to think of ways to engage your classmates. At minimum, identify a set of questions that you would like to pose to the class. Alternatively, you are free to lead the class in a structured activity that complements the paper topics. You may draw inspiration from role-playing paper-reading seminars.

Presenters are welcome to come by office hours the week before their presentation to discuss.

Deliverables

• Prepare a 20-30 minute long presentation (combined, for both presenters and both assigned papers). Note that this is exclusive of in-class questions and discussion.
• By 9:00am one day before class, submit a PDF of your slides on Canvas.
  • Only one presenter should submit. Indicate the names of both presenters on the slides.
  • Submit this as a PDF with one slide per page and with presenter notes. The notes don’t have to be a full script; they can be rough bullet points.
  • One slide should be a bibliography of the articles you read.
  • You may continue to edit the slides after submitting them. During class, present from your own laptop. (If this will be an issue, let the course staff know.)