Critiques

A Critique is a short description of the key contributions and weaknesses of a paper, and why you think so. It might also relate it to another paper. I want your opinions and thoughts about what's interesting and notable about the paper, or what you found confusing (and why). A critique should be no more than one page long, and may be in bulleted form.

The Critiques need to point out both good and bad things about the paper. i.e., the strengths and weaknesses. I'm interested in your opinions as much as your knowledge. Also try to relate papers to your own experience.

Include technical information, in addition to the obvious more `syntactic' stuff about the clarity of writing, the structure of the paper, the description of related work, etc.

You must include technical criticism. Consider things like:

• what did you like most/least about the ideas in the paper?
• have they told you too much about something, or not enough?
• does it tackle an interesting and significant problem?
• is the work/result described new?
• have the authors made it clear what the contribution of the work really is?
• are the techniques suitable for ALL similar (e.g., design) problems? if not why? what do the authors say about that?
• do the techniques used have any obvious flaws? (e.g., as in the case of Hillclimbing) Are they reported in the paper? If so, do they offer any way to compensate for them? If not, why?
• do the techniques described scale up well to larger problems?
• have they adequately described their assumptions about the context of their work (e.g., it is routine; experts are available; optimization is not needed; etc). Are the assumptions valid?
• is there related work that is very similar? how does it differ? do they make it clear? if not, why?
• has the system been well validated and evaluated?
• are there other systems that do a better job of the same problem?
• have they clearly related their work to the work on which it has been based?

I'm looking for informed opinion. But, in this case it is better to say something wrong, than to say nothing.