CS290F HW02: Paper Reviewing and Analysis
Due: January 11, 2010 (BEFORE class)

Objectives

The objective of this assignment is to develop an understanding for how good papers are structured and to practice analyzing papers by reviewing two papers: an assigned paper and a paper of your choosing.

Assignment Details

As discussed in class, there are numerous ways to write a paper. Regardless, there are some components that all papers should have.

For this assignment you will be using a paper review form common to many workshops and conferences. Typically, there are some quantitative questions at the beginning and then some qualitative questions at the end. The form you should use for this assignment is the following: 

Familiarity: Rate your familiarity with the topic of the paper.  	
     Expert (I conduct(ed) active research work in this topic)
     Familiar (I am well aware of research work in this topic)
     Some knowledge (I am marginally aware of research work in this topic)
     Novice (I am not familiar with research work in this area, and serve as an outsider reviewer)

*Recommendation: Your overall rating
     Definite accept (top 5%, excellent paper)
     Likely accept (top 15% but not top 5%, significant contribution)
     Accept if room (top 30% but not top 15%, borderline)
     Likely Reject (top 50% but not in top 30%, needs more work)
     Definite Reject (bottom 50%)

Strengths: What are the major reasons to accept the paper? [Be brief.]

Weaknesses: What are the major reasons NOT to accept the paper? [Be brief.]

Detailed Comments: Please provide detailed comments that will help the TPC assess the paper and help provide feedback to the authors.
The first paper you should review is the following: A. Garyfalos and K. Almeroth, "Coupons: A Multilevel Incentive Scheme for Information Dissemination in Mobile Networks", IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 7, num. 6, pp. 792-804, June 2008. This paper went through several rounds of very critical reviews before it was finally accepted so it should be fairly good in most respects. Still, you might be able to find some weaknesses if you look hard enough (NOTE: even though I am a co-author on the paper and I will obviously know who you are if you make critical comments, that's okay, I can handle it. In fact, I'd be very interested if anyone could come up with some major weaknesses we didn't see originally.) What this paper is more important for is to make sure that the components we talked about in class are in the paper.

The second paper for you to review is a paper of your choosing. It might be a paper you've previously read or something you came across in doing HW01. I'd strongly recommend choosing a paper that is related to the project area you are interested in pursuing. Try and choose a paper from a major venue (to the degree you've been able to identify the good ones). Use the same review form given above.

Assignment Turnin

Email a copy to "almeroth@cs.ucsb.edu" with the Subject line: "CS290F HW02 Turnin". Your name should not appear anywhere on a printed version of the assignment. (I will figure out who you are based on your email address.) Assignments are due by the time class starts (9:00am) on January 11, 2010.