Review Requirements for COMP / ELEC / STAT 602

Students will be required to turn in short (approximately one page) reviews of 4-5 selected papers, which will clearly be assigned for review. (All papers assigned for review are part of the reading assignments but not all papers assigned for reading will be assigned for review.) Students will write the reviews by the indicated deadline, to be prepared for critiquing and discussing the paper. The reviews will be due at the beginning of the class in which that paper is presented, unless indicated otherwise in the reading assignment. The student who presents the paper will be exempt from writing a review of the same paper. Instead, (s)he will turn in his or her presentation for evaluation.

The review of a paper must fulfill the following criteria:
1. Be short, approximately a page.
2. Have a summary paragraph describing what the paper's declared purpose is, what techniques are used (have been invented) to achieve that purpose, and what the declared results are.
3. Have a main paragraph describing the technical approach (substantive details of techniques / innovation), and the reviewer's critique of the merits; is the technical approach sound; was the declared purpose demonstrably achieved; were the results (experiments) well documented and convincing; if not, what shortcomings can be noted; what is the significance of the work (did the authors discuss the scope of applicability, do the reviewer agree with those, how does this work compare to others the reviewer may know, etc.). (Not all of these points may apply to every paper, and there may be other points to note about some papers. I am giving general guidelines. If in doubt, please come discuss.)
4. Have a (very short, 1-2 line) paragraph evaluating the quality of the writing: is the paper well written, clear, easy to follow, are the figures clear, informative, is the language correct, etc.
5. Be well written: have a clear logical flow, and correct use of English.
6. Be written in LaTeX, have the title and authors of the paper, as well as the name of the students and the date, listed on it. In addition, a summary rating "Excellent", "Average" or "Poor" will be assigned at the top.

A sample review will be provided, along with a LaTeX review template and corresponding .bib file. (The .bib file will contain BibTeX entries for most of the papers that we read in this course.)

Reviews will be graded and feedback provided. After feedback, students will be required to revise their reviews and upload the final version in both .tex and .pdf form, along with any necessary BibTeX files, to a designated location (TBA). Review files will be named according to the following convention: [initials]-602_review[firstauthor&year].tex and [initials]-602_review[firstauthor&year].pdf. For example, EM-602_reviewKohonen1990.tex

The main criteria for grading the reviews will be:
- capturing the essence of a paper clearly and correctly (3)
- quality of evaluation, scholarly criticism (5)
- necessary length and correct references (1)
- correct use of English grammar/spelling (1)

The approxiamate weighting for each criterion is the number (points) in parentheses. Thus the maximum possible score is 10.