write a reading report

CSC 529 - Readings

Ten readings have been selected and uploaded to the D2L. Readings are drawn from academic journals

to the popular press, from theoretical concepts to practical applications and from interesting recent

findings to important historical results. You will complete one reading per week.

As a graduate student in a data science program, you should be able to read and understand high-level

research papers. The goal of the readings is not necessarily to master the concepts described in the

papers, but to practice synthesizing this level of material and understanding it well enough to extract the

important or relevant insights.

When grading the paper reviews, I expect complete well thought out arguments and conclusions.

Egregious misspellings, sentence fragments or copy/pasted text from the article will result in poor scores.

Plagiarism in any form will not be tolerated. I expect each student to work independently.

After reading the assigned article, the following questions should be used to complete your review:

1. Describe in a single sentence the motivation of the paper.

2. Describe in a single sentence the main contribution of the paper.

3. What is the importance of these contributions? What impact might they have (have had) on

theory or practice of Data Science? (About 200 words)

4. What previously established results does the paper build upon and how? (About 200 words)

5. What reasoning, demonstration, analytical or empirical analysis did they use to establish their

results? (About 200 words)

6. Answer one of the following three questions: What lessons should researchers take away from

this work? What is the lasting impact of this work? What (if any) questions do this work leave

open? (About 500 words)

Some important notes:

• Late readings incur a penalty of 1% per hour. NO EXCEPTIONS.

• The word count is a guideline, not a requirement. If you write a shallow 1000 word regurgitation,

you will receive a lower grade than someone that writes 400 words of thoughtful analysis.

• Occasionally, a reading does not “fit nicely” into the questions above. When this occurs, do your

best to answer the spirit of the questions. In general, questions 4-6 look backward, present and

forward.

• If you have a great interest in a research paper, you may substitute it for one of the assigned

readings so long as 1) it represents the selected algorithm (e.g. Ensemble techniques or Bayesian

networks), 2) it constitutes a reading of similar difficulty, and 3) you email it to me for approval

beforehand. You may substitute papers no more than three times this quarter.