Until 24.10. 23:59, send an email to the supervisor of your project and tobias.wegel (at) inf.ethz.ch with a pdf containing:
Consider this as an opportunity for you to receive feedback
.pdf format to your assigned project advisor via e-mail, according to instruction belowThe project report and presentation should include the following sections:
In presentation (and report):
“Detective hat”: Intuitive (not just technical level) understanding of proof, assumptions, statement in depth
“Reviewer hat”: Which relevant questions does it shed light on and it actually answer it / solve the problem? How significant is the addition of this paper compared to existing literature?
What are interesting, impactful follow-up questions they did not answer and would be interesting to pursue? Show evidence that the question(s) you identified are indeed relevant to understand important phenomena in practice and are novel in the literature. You can start with the paper’s weakness. Examples are:
This is often the key step while doing research - consult with your project supervisor who might also have some thoughts on possible ideas if you are not sure.
In report:
Break down your own follow-up questions / problem as much as you can into chunks that you can indeed pursue (or at least, the first few steps), e.g. to prove a conjecture give intuition, lemmas you think you need, and try to prove some of them. The same holds for experiments.
Show your attempts to tackle the first few steps.
The total project grade will depend equally on
Basics:
Content structure (see this for more details) in terms of percentage estimates of time spent on each part of the presentation
The later your presentation, the more of the last bullet point is expected to be included.
Grade determined by peer feedback and supervisors/PI on the presentation.
You don’t need to follow a particular template, but in our experience PowerPoint or Keynote often lead to more comprehensible presentations whereas latex/beamer tempts the presenter to use too many formulas. At the same time please do not copy paste theorems or proofs from the paper but use your own words to convey the intuition and key concepts.
See rubric which will be used for assessment.
Content:
The combination of presentation slides and report should contain the content described above. The way to split it will probably be different in each project. If you were able to discuss the proof in the amount of detail you find insightful during the presentation, you can focus more on your own work.
Furthermore the pure reproduction (including necessary restructuring and rephrasing) of paper result + proof presentation sections should not constitute more than 50% of the report. Your own investigations should be in the focus here. That may include an extensive literature review, experimental explorations, follow-up theoretical conjectures/results etc. If the proof is poorly presented in the original paper (i.e. convoluting the key ingredients etc.), a simpler proof will also count towards “own investigations”
Length: In the Neurips format (see template below) it should be at most 10 pages main text, excluding references and appendix, where you could add more experiments and proof of technical lemmas etc.
Style:
Please see the following guidelines which will be used to guide the presentation portion of the report grade
Under construction. Check back later in the semester.
In terms of content, it is not the absolute results that will be graded (i.e. you don’t have to prove a new theorem or write a new conference paper), but the depth at which you investigate the paper’s faults and contributions critically, put it into context and the novelty and impact of the follow-up questions that you would like to pursue. Hence, primarily you will be graded on points 1-4 in Final Content
Obviously it’s great if you succeed to solve your follow-up questions (i.e. successfully manage points 5-6), and that’ll be a big bonus for the grade, but you can achieve a good grade without actually having publishable results. Maybe think of it as a proposal for a master thesis project with preliminary ideas and/or results.
Papers suggested this semester - Link will be updated
You can choose your own paper, however you have to double check with Tobias Wegel and Fanny Yang before registering the paper.
Please put your name down on the project spreadsheet next to the paper starting 14.10. 14:00, when edit rights will be given.
If there are two papers listed for one number it means that you are expected to read both for context (this actually makes your life easier since you are given what you otherwise need to find yourself) and you can choose to focus on one
One group per paper, two people per group. First come first serve.