Guidelines for preparing the slides

I guess you are preparing your slides. In case you are wondering where to start, here are some tips.

• Think of the structure of your talk (divide it in main sections and write a few keywords for each of them)
• Work out the single sections (maybe divide them in subsections now)
• Try the talk
• Start again: make your correction and try it again.

As for the structure, here are a few questions you could keep in mind while working on it:

• What is the problem you are going to present?
• Why is it important?
• What is the goal of your talk?
• Explains what you said.
• Give an example pointing out problems you have mentioned
• Give the same example pointing out how the problems were solved by the analysis you are presenting.
• Draw conclusions (also maybe open problems)
• Give references

This is an example, keep in mind to be as clear as possible, to link your claims and saying "what why and how". Trying to recall what you did not like of e.g. my slides and try not to do the same mistakes ;)

Guidelines for writing paper critiques

The purpose of a critique is not to summarize the paper; rather you should choose one or two points about the work that you found interesting. Examples of questions that you might address are:

• What problem does this paper solve, and what are the strengths and limitations of its approach?
• Is the evaluation fair? Does it achieve the stated goals of the paper?
• Does the method described seem mature enough to use in real applications? Why or why not? What applications seem particularly amenable to this approach?
• What good ideas does the problem formulation, the solution, the approach or the research method contain that could be applied elsewhere?
• What would be good follow-on projects and why?
• Are the paper's underlying assumptions valid?
• Which important issues in the field does this paper illuminate and how?
• Did the paper provide a clear enough and detailed enough description of the proposed methods for you to be able to implement them? If not, where is additional clarification or detail needed?

Your critique should be typed (single space) and should list the title of the paper and its authors at the top, along with your name.

Avoid unsupported value judgments, like ``I liked...'' or ``I disagreed with...'' If you make judgments of this sort, explain why you liked or disagreed with the point you describe.

Be sure to distinguish comments about the writing of the paper from comment about the technical content of the work.