This "proponent" team will be responsible for summarizing the main ideas and techniques to be studied on that given day in a formal presentation. This should correspond to a comprehensive summary of the area based on the readings. This summary can be largely extracted from the assigned readings. Beyond that, you are strongly encouraged to go beyond the assigned readings and search the literature and identify other interesting work or projects related to the topic at hand. Also note that while the course page will provide multiple papers for the topic, the topic itself is the important thing. So in some cases, you cannot present all information from all the papers down to their nitty-gritty details -- instead, you need to focus on the main ideas and then make a judgement to go down to the more interesting details.
Overall, your goal should be to explain the advantages of the ideas, and to advocate why they are interesting and likely to have a major impact on future systems. Make sure to convey clearly in your presentation how the assigned topic relates to stream and sensor data management.
This "rebuttal" team will be responsible for discussing the ideas you have read about, questioning their value, and identifying possible shortcomings. In short, you will present a rebuttal to the presentation given by the proponent team. Come to class prepared with a variety of material organized to identify short-comings of the techniques -- these could be in the form of questions about the limited applicability of the techniques, assumptions made that make the the techniques not ever useful in practice, counterexamples of what is really needed, and in general doubtful of the work. I would expect that you may have several mini-powerpoints ready to go, and in most cases that you have an example or a list of ideas sketched out on a piece of paper. In any case, do not come empty-handed. You are responsible for keeping the class "lively" and "awake".
There are various ways you can try to develop your "rebuttal" position. For instance, you could take the position of a vendor of a traditional database system that claims that the new feature could easily be handled already with current technology, or the position of a specialized domain person that feels that the new feature is much more appropriately supported in a domain-specific proprietary software and thus doubts that putting it into general stream engine would be of any use.
All other students in neither of the two teams above serve as active audience -- with the emphasis on "active"! You are expected to participate in the discussion, to ask questions, to put forth suggestions or explanations. You may be called upon at any time by either the instructor, the proponent team, or the rebuttal team to answer questions, participate in an exercise, or to take a side.
Also, in order to ensure that you are coming to class prepared, every student in the audience must individually prepare a critique of the assigned reading and turn it in to the instructor on that day.
The proponent team is expected to prepare several (at least one) excercises that ask the class to step through the main technique or algorithms in the paper. The students will work through the assigned excercise in class, and then jointly discuss their results. This can be done during the presentation by the proponent team, if appropriate, or separately in a later part of that class session. In some cases, the instructor may also have prepared a different in-class excercise the students will be asked to do. Should we not have the time (or energy or brains) to completely finish an excercise in class, then everyone will take it home to complete (as informal homework) and you then are to return so that next time we will go over your solutions and thoughts in class.
In this last part of the class meeting, we will jointly sketch out a class tutorial on the topic of that day. One representative from the proponent and one from the rebuttal team will be assigned to jointly lead this exercise. These two teams will also select one designated person to take notes (on the keyboard) about our suggestions for the content of this tutorial. This may include corrections on the presentation of the day, summaries of material from the rebuttals, or overall flow and structure of the main material that should be included or omitted from this tutorial report. The proponent and rebuttal teams will then jointly turn this rough outline into a full tutorial off-line. This tutorial material is expected to contain at a minimum: (a) a written document (typically 5 to 10 pages or so, though there is no upper or lower limit, incorporting concrete examples and excercises in as much as possible), and supplementing powerpoint presentation (clearly, this would be a collated, extended and corrected version of the powerpoint that the proponent and rebuttal teams would already have had prepared for the class to begin with). This tutorial will be due one week later, to be submitted to the instructor as electronic documents latest in the subsequent class session (next thursday). The instructor will make this 'tutorial material' available to the class as a whole on the course website as a resource to the class (basically, to serve as basis and notes for preparing yourself for the final exam).
end of class structure