HW5
Homework 5 - Reading a scientific article
Due Oct 27 at 22:00.
Part 1 - How to read an article
a. Read the following short articles:
Mary Purugganan and Jan Hewitt, How to read a scientific paper (Links to an external site.),
S. Keshav, How to read a paper, (Links to an external site.)
Philip W. L. Fong, How to read a computer science research paper (Links to an external site.)(only page 1-3).
These articles reflect the background of their authors in different ways:
The first of these contains some good advice, and a template that you will use in Part 2 of this homework assignment. However, the authors have a background in biochemistry rather than computer science, which makes some comments less relevant.
The second article is written by Srinivasan Keshav, who is now a professor of computer science at the University of Cambridge. He recommends three stages in reading a paper, where the third consists of working through the paper to virtually re-implement the results. In theory-based research this is excellent advice, but it may be less feasible in experimental fields.
The third article is also written by a computer scientist, Philip Wong. The last part of that article deals with advice on reading a paper as referee, and can be skipped.
Some additional optional reading on reading is:
Carey MA, Steiner KL, Petri WA Jr (2020). Ten simple rules for reading a scientific paper. (Links to an external site.) PLoS Comput Biol 16(7): e1008032.
Erren TC, Cullen P, Erren M (2009). How to surf today’s information tsunami: on the craft of effective reading. (Links to an external site.) Med Hypotheses 73: 278–279.
Alastair Reid, Summarizing 12 months of reading papers (Links to an external site.)
and more for fun:
Adam Ruben, How to read a scientific paper (Links to an external site.).
Part 2 - Reading an article
a. Read one of these scientific articles, keeping the advice from part 1 in mind:
Frank Arute et al. (2019). Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor.
Tshitoyan, V. et al. (2019). Unsupervised word embeddings capture latent knowledge from materials science literature.
Jure Leskovec, Jon Kleinberg & Christor Faloutsos (2005). Graphs over time: densification laws, shrinking diameters and possible explanations.
Kevin S. Killourhy and R. Maxion (2009). Comparing anomaly-detection algorithms for keystroke dynamics.
Obermeyer, Z. et al (2019). Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations.
Noah Snavely, Steven M. Seitz, Richard Szeliski (2006). Photo tourism: Exploring photo collections in 3D.
Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding.
Full references and access information were not included on purpose. Discuss how and where you accessed the article, and provide a correct reference in the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) format. (Links to an external site.)If there are several choices of access or reference, motivate which one you have chosen.
b. Where was the article published - in a journal, conference proceedings, or a preprint archive for example? Characterize briefly the medium of publication (or media, if it appeared in more than one way) - what was the scientific field of the journal (or other), what impact/recognition does it have, is it actually peer-reviewed? Why do you think the authors chose this particular way of publishing their results?
c. Apply the technique by Purugganan and Hewitt, and copy and fill in the template at the end of their article. Pay particular attention to the fields Context and Significance.
d. List at least 2 articles among the references of the article that you would like to follow up, and make a short note of why. Take a quick look at these articles to see that they actually are relevant. Also, choose at least 2 newer articles that make a reference to the article you have chosen and you would like to read, and make a short note of why you selected these two.
e. Even though the article by Purugganan and Hewitt contains some good advice on reading, it mostly relates to other scientific fields than computer science, and contains some statements that may not be entirely relevant to articles in CS. Sample at least three of the articles listed, and check whether they follow the IMRD format. Discuss your findings: in particular, are there subfields of computer science where this format is more appropriate, and others where it is not really appropriate?
f. All the articles listed above are considered significant contributions to their subfield. This is for example reflected in how often they have been cited by others - how many times has this happened in the case of the article you have chosen?
g. Finish this exercise by stating, as clearly as possible in a single sentence, the essence of the contribution of the article you have chosen to computer science, or science in general.
Some of the articles are published in journals that are not open source, and need to be accessed through the publisher. The KTH library has subscriptions to these journals, which lets you access them. If you have trouble accessing articles when not connected to eduroam, the KTH Library can help you, see:
Handing in your solution
Please save your solution as a pdf file and hand it in BOTH here in Canvas as Homework 5a and on the Peergrade page. Do not write your name in the pdf file.
Note - this is a backup procedure to ensure that all your homework is graded by the TAs, since it is likely that Peergrade does not yet work for all students.
Peer grading
You will be asked to review the homework of three other students. Your solution will also be reviewed in this way. This assumes that Peergrade is fully functional - further instructions will be added
Feedback from your TA
Your TA will grade your submission and report the result in Canvas.
Complete means you have passed the assignment.
Incomplete means you have to hand in a revised version.