The majority of this course will center around the discussion of book chapters or published research papers. The instructor will be presenting several such documents throughout the course, and the students will also be preparing one or maybe two such presentations. For this, students will work individually -- or possibly in teams of two, if you decide that you prefer this. Each student will be assigned several topics for in-depth study based on the selected coverage of topics in the course, your expressed preferences, and number of students in the course. There are two options; either a paper will be assigned to the student, or in some cases a student can also self-select paper (s) of interest to him or her based on a literature study he or she has conducted to identify these papers. Ideally, we would like to see both throughout the course.
Topics and papers are assigned first-come first-served. I'll be assigning topics (and associated documents) for some portion of the class. However, you should also attempt to select your own paper to present for at least one of the days. For that, you may want to first collect background papers from the literature in your chosen area, roughly say 5 closely related papers. If you are self-selecting a specific paper, you should again consult with the instructor on the appropriateness of the material. You will need to get the topic and the specific papers approved by the instructor well before giving the talk. And, we'll need to select one key paper among the chosen papers and make it available to the class at least 1 week before your presentation, so that the paper can be copied and distributed to the other students before the paper will be discussed in the class.
The student assigned to the paper as the presenter is expected to deeply enough master "her topic" by reading sufficient material on that topic. Then she would share this knowledge with the rest of the class in the form of a presentation with well-organized presentation slides (tutorial style overheads in powerpoint format) to be made available to everyone in class.
Note, you will not simple be a presenter, but rather think of yourself as the discussion leader. The student will be responsible for leading the discussion on her topic. For this, you can assume that the other students indeed have read the same paper; but possibly they have read it a bit more quickly and/or they have not understood it as deeply as you may have. Be ready to have some example that you can walk through with your audience; and to have some questions you plan to raise with the students in your audience to give them a chance to try out the ideas and algorithms.
You are expected to prepare professional quality transparencies for your presentation to help the others to understand your presentation. You need to make this material available to the students in the class. Ideally, they should be available when you give your talk. Hence email them to the instructor, so that they can be linked into the course webpage in time.
Besides presenting, you need to submit to the instructor
your presentation slides (in hardcopy) latest at the start of your talk.
The presentation, the overheads,
and the preparedness of the student with the material
will be graded. If you ended up re-using in part existing
material from the web for your presentation itself, you need to make
sure to full acknowledge this (again making sure that you have
not committed any copyright
issues or plagerism)!
You will be assigned a 'grade' for each of your presentations. The grade of this assignment will be given using the following as rough guideline: