CS 518: Homework Guidelines

The goals of the homework are to encourage students:

to keep up with the reading assignments,
to think critically and creatively during reading, and
to develop project ideas early.

The homework format is the following.

Each student writes a short (roughly 1/4 to 1/2 page) "observation" of the assigned reading. Turn in an on-line version by sending mail to randy_class@cs.princeton.edu before the class during which the assigned reading is to be discussed.
Each student is expected to turn in a total of 20 such observations during the semester, each worth 1.5 points. I expect the total number of papers to be covered to comfortably exceed 20. This means that students can skip quite a few papers in case of scheduling conflicts without being penalized.

The observations are posted automatically on the web. Class participants can read each others' posts. In terms of contents, the paper observation can be anything a student feels like saying about the paper, as long as it is not some sort of dry summary. This is to discourage people from lifting boring stuff from the abstract, the introduction, or the conclusion of the paper. Here are some possible ideas of a paper observation:

Pointing out weaknesses of the paper;
Asking questions;
Speculating on how the paper can be improved;
Designing a new experiment to augment the study;
An interesting future direction (not mentioned by the paper);
Comparison against a related paper;
Really, anything at all. Basically say something clever!

Analyzing, synthesizing, applying, fixing, and extending past work is a big part of OS research. I won't be surprised if some of these paper observations spawn projects and, subsequently, conference papers.