CMPT 985 (Spring 2022) - Paper Review of Critique (15% of Course Grade)

"We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work." - Feynman, Richard Philips (Nobel Lecture)

In this course component, you will have the choice of writing either a technical paper review, SIGGRAPH style, or a critique of an article. Please complete by March 15, and submit one PDF file, either review.pdf or critique.pdf, to CourSys by 11:45PM electronically.

Paper Review: SIGGRAPH style

 You are to simulate a technical paper review for SIGGRAPH, the premier conference in computer graphics. Up to now, we have seen quite a few SIGGRAPH papers and you have presented several of them. Although none of you should really consider yourself as a seasoned SIGGRAPH reviewer, at least you have some initial calibration. To help you further, here is a prior SIGGRAPH submission with two real technical reviews: one positive and one negative. Please do NOT share any of these three documents outside this class.

The article that you will review is "Learning Scene Functionality via Activity Prediction and Hallucination". Given all we have seen in this class so far, you should feel technically competent to review the paper.

Here are two classic write-ups related to writing SIGGRAPH reviews, both by pioneers in the field of computer graphics: "How to get your SIGGRAPH paper rejected?" by Jim Kayia in 1993, and "Writing (SIGGRAPH) Technical Reviews" by Greg Turk in 2008. Although the questions in the reviews you will write are different now (they are more general), these past wisdoms still very much apply today.

Your review should be no shorter than 2 pages and no longer than 2.5 pages, including the questions prompts (in MS Word, 1.5-spacing, following this template).

Article Critique

You are to write a two-page critique (specifically, no shorter than 1.5 pages and no longer than 2 pages, excluding references, in MS Word, 1.5-spacing, following this template) of the following article by Aaron Hertzmann:

Computers Do Not Make Art, People Do, Communications of the ACM, May 2020, Vol. 63 No. 5, Pages 45-48.

This is an interesting column about AI, creativity, and art. It is referred to as a "viewpoint", not a technical research paper. The critique you write should provide a critical assessment of the article's main point(s), the arguments presented, and the evidences provided. In the end, you may or may not agree with the main message, but should put forward thoughts that would support your position, either for or against.

There are a lot of online resources to offer useful pointers on writing article critiques. Here is one guideline, and here is another link, where there is a sample critique. You are advised to follow the guidelines provided within.

The grading of your critique will put 80% weight on the quality of the critical assessments and 20% on the quality of the writing.

Richard (Hao) Zhang / haoz at cs dot sfu dot ca