CS886 - Paper Critiques

• Two paper critiques (17.5% of final mark each).  Feel free to submit more than 2 critiques and only the marks of your two best critiques will count.
  
• The papers critiqued should be different from the paper presented
  
• To be done individually

Format

• At most 2 pages
• Put yourself in the shoes of a reviewer for a conference or journal
• Give constructive feedback to the authors
• For every criticism, make a suggestion to improve the paper
• Mention also the good aspects of the paper
• If you don't understand something, mention it and explain why you are having trouble to understand.  It is the responsibility of the author to make everything clear in the paper, therefore it is important to point out the parts that are difficult to understand and why.
  

Suggested questions to structure your critique

• What's the paper about?
• What are the contributions?
• What's the take home message?

• Are the ideas novel/original?
• Are the contributions significant?
  

• Are the ideas presented technically correct?
• Are the proofs accurate?
• Are the algorithms correct?
  

• Are the ideas/algorithms empirically or theoretically evaluated?
• If some assumptions are made, are they realistic?
• Is scalability demonstrated?
  

• Is the paper properly situated with respect to related work?
  
• Is there a brief survey of related work?
• Do the authors explain similarities and differences with previous work?
  

• Is the paper well structured?
• Does the abstract properly and accurately summarize the paper?
• Do the introduction and conclusion clearly explain the contributions and the take home message?
• Is the flow of ideas easy to follow?
• Is the paper well written?
• Are all the technical terms and abreviations explained?
  
• Are there important grammatical errors?
• Are there a lot of typos?