CS 5970 — Technical Paper Review

NOTE: The hardcopies of the parts of this assignment are due at the beginning of the class period. This means that if you are even a minute late, you lose 20%. If you are worried about potentially being late, turn in your assignments ahead of time. Do this by submitting them to me during office hours or by sliding them under my office door. Electronic copies are due by 4:00 pm on the due date. Submit them through D2L before the time they are due. Do not send assignments to me through email or leave them in my departmental mail box.

Each student will review one technical paper in writing. This will be the first of the two papers that the student will present to the class. As noted in that assignment, students will propose papers for their presentations and the instructor will approve or reject these proposals. All papers must come from the primary, peer reviewed literature in evolutionary computation (broadly defined). Each student will turn in a draft review that will be examined by the instructor who will provide feedback that the student should use to improve his or her review for the final version. This review may be integrated into the student’s large project.

Draft Review

The review will consist of the same components as the presentation.

• Approach Summary. You are to write a summary that includes the main ideas behind the approach. This summary does not need to compare this approach to any other. However, it should be detailed enough that a reader familiar with different approaches to the same topic should be able to recognize that the approach you are summarizing is, in fact, different.

  The approach summary will include these points:

  1. The domain/application.
  2. The problem to be solved or question to be answered.
  3. The motivation for solving this problem or answering this question and why evolutionary computation is involved.
  4. The hypothesis.
  5. The approach and methodology.
  6. The experiment(s).
  7. The results.
  8. The conclusions.
  9. Future work.

  Please Note: Taking the first line or two from each paragraph in a paper, stringing them together, and changing around a few words here or there to make things read better, is NOT a summary. It is plagiarism—a form of academic misconduct. Any time you quote a source, you must include the quotation in quotation marks and clearly indicate the source of the quotation. If you find yourself with more than a couple of brief quotes in each summary, then you are quoting too much. To summarize a paper, you need to (1) read it, (2) understand it, and (3) briefly relate its main points in your own words. If you don't have your own words to describe the approach, that probably means that you don't understand the paper—you'll need to go back to steps 1 and 2 and visit me during office hours as needed to help you with step 2. (I don't expect most students to have problems understanding the difference between a summary and plagiarism. This message is for those few who do.) Again, if you don't understand what it means to describe something "in your own words," please read the Provost's web pages on academic integrity, particularly the documents related to plagiarism.)

  The summary should run from 3 to 4 pages in length at roughly 80 characters per line, 25 lines per page. You should double space this document, so that I have room to write comments/corrections on it. (Again, this is a guideline range. Values somewhat outside this range are acceptable. However, if you go much over 4 pages, I may take off points for being excessively verbose.)

• Critical Evaluation. Once you have summarized the approach, you should give a critical evaluation of it. The term 'critical' here does not mean negative. Rather, it means, like any good critic, you should thoroughly evaluate the approach, in a principled way, and give your best judgment as to its strengths and weaknesses. The critical evaluation is worth half of the review points and should be extensive.

  The critical evaluation should run from 3 to 4 pages in length at roughly 80 characters per line, 25 lines per page. You should double space this document, so that I have room to write comments/corrections on it. (Again, this is a guideline range.)

You should submit an electronic copy of your draft review before class through D2L and turn in a printed copy at the start of class. Due: Monday, October 4.

Final Review

The final review will consist of all the same elements as the draft review. However, because you will have received feedback based on your draft review, the final review should be of higher quality. You should submit an electronic copy of your final review before class through D2L and turn in a printed copy at the start of class. Due: Wednesday, November 3. When you submit your paper copy of your final review, you must also resubmit your graded paper copy of your draft review.