CSC2227S | Summer 2021 | Paper Reviews

How to submit

Go to the 2227 HotCRP site to submit your reviews.

Paper Review Guidelines

An important component of this course is critical reading of the assigned papers and coming to class ready to discuss them. To help you in this process, we require that you submit a short review of each paper before the beginning of the class in which the paper will be discussed.

Your reviews should:

• State the 3 most important things the paper says. These could be some combination of their motivations, observations, interesting parts of the design, or clever parts of their implementation.
• Describe the paper's single most glaring deficiency. Every paper has some fault. Perhaps an experiment was poorly designed or the main idea had a narrow scope or applicability. Being able to assess weaknesses as well as strengths is an important skill for this course and beyond.
• Describe what conclusion you draw from the paper as to how to build systems in the future. Most of the assigned papers have been significant to the systems community and have had some lasting impact on the area.
• Pose a question, idea, or issue that you would like to include in the class discussion. For example, you might ask for clarification of some point in the paper, speculate on how the main technique might be applied to a different problem, propose an alternate technique to solve the same problem, etc.

We do not want a book report or a repeat of the paper's abstract. Rather, we want your considered opinions about the key points indicated above. Of course, if you have an insight that doesn't fit the above format, please include it as well.

We want the reviews to be short, between 1/4 and 1/2 a page. Reviews must be submitted through the course HotCRP site. They should be spell-checked, and written in full sentences (except where the review form indicates that a bullet list is acceptable).

Reviews will be graded on a complete/incomplete basis (a very poor review will be considered incomplete). Each review is worth roughly 1%.

You do not have to prepare a written review for a paper that you are presenting.

You will be able to see other reviews on HotCRP as soon as you submit your own.