Journal Club
Your 10% journal club mark consists of two components:
- Reading each paper and participating in weekly discussions (5%)
- Reading a single paper more thoroughly and presenting that paper (5%)
The signup sheet is on D2L. You will need to be logged in to your MRU Google account to access it.
Presentation
The week you have signed up to present, read the paper and prepare a (maximum) 10 minute presentation. You may use whatever file format you wish, and feel free to copy and paste relevant diagrams or quotes from the paper (a single citation at the start suffices for this purpose). If you include material from other resources, these must be cited as usual.
When creating your presentation, consider the following guiding questions. You don’t need to use these headings specifically, and not every question applies to every paper, but it’s a place to start.
Paper Summary
- What are the main contributions of this work?
- What is the context (timeframe, prior knowledge, etc) of this paper?
- How did the authors justify their conclusions?
Paper’s influence
With the power of hindsight, we can look back and see what impact each paper had on the field of machine learning. Most of them are widely cited. Consider the following:
- If applicable, try to find implementations of the algorithms described by the paper. These may be shared by the authors (for more recent papers), or implemented by others (for pre-2000s papers)
- Are the methods described in the paper still relevant today?
- What is your impression of the impact that this paper had on the field of machine learning?
Your opinions
- What did you like about the paper?
- What was the most confusing or challenging to understand?
- Any additional thoughts?
Rubric
Each of the three sections will be assessed on a 4-point scale, with an additional score for sharing your thoughts and responding to classmates’ questions during the discussion period.
| Component | Score out of 4 |
|---|---|
| Paper summary | |
| Paper’s influence | |
| Your opinions | |
| Discussion | |
| Total out of 16 |
| Score | Description |
|---|---|
| 4 | Excellent - thoughtful and creative without any errors or omissions |
| 3 | Pretty good, but with minor errors or omissions |
| 2 | Mostly complete, but with major errors or omissions, lacking in detail |
| 1 | A minimal effort was made, incomplete or incorrect |
| 0 | No effort was made, or the submission is plagiarized |