15-712 Paper Summaries

An important component of 712 is critical reading of the assigned papers and coming to class ready to discuss them. To help you in this process, we require that you email a short review of each paper before the beginning of the class during which we will discuss the paper.

Your summaries should:

• State the 3 most important things the paper says. These could be some combination of their motivations, observations, interesting parts of the design, or clever parts of their implementation.
• Describe the paper's single most glaring deficiency. Every paper has some fault. Perhaps an experiment was poorly designed or the main idea had a narrow scope or applicability. Being able to assess weaknesses as well as strengths is an important skill for this course and beyond.
• Describe what conclusion you draw from the paper as to how to build systems in the future. Most of the assigned papers are significant to the systems community and have had some lasting impact on the area.

We do not want a book report or a repeat of the paper's abstract. Rather, we want your considered opinions about the key points indicated above. Of course, if you have an insight that doesn't fit the above format, please include it as well.

Summaries should be short, between 1/4 and 1/2 a page. Summaries must be emailed in plain text (not HTML, Word, PDF, etc.) to James.Hendricks@cs.cmu.edu. Please send the summary as an attachment in plain text titled LASTNAME_DATE.txt, where date is the date when the reading is due. For example, for a summary due 9-12, James Hendricks would title his summary "Hendricks_9-12.txt". See this template for an example. On days when multiple readings are due, write two summaries and send them in a single text file unless otherwise noted in the syllabus.

All summaries will be counted, and a random sample of the summaries will be graded. Do not skip class or come late just to finish a summary—we expect that everyone will miss a few, though skipping more than 10% will have a negative impact on your grade.

Last updated: Thu Nov 15 02:12:28 -0500 2007 [validate xhtml]