My original plan for this course was the one-to-many format: one student presents a paper and some other students come with critiques of the paper to stimulate discussion. Alec Jacobson and Colin Raffel make a convincing case that because many audience-members do not have a role in the class session, discussion can flounder.

To fix this, they propose a many-to-many format: each student plays a specific role in the class discussion. Inspired by this, in this course in each class section except the first each student will take on one of the following roles:

👩‍🔬 Scientific Peer Reviewer

As a trusted reviewer for a top-tier conference/journal, this paper has just landed on your desk. You are tasked with carefully analyzing the paper as a peer reviewer. Complete a full—critical but not necessarily negative—review of the paper following these guidelines for NeurIPS reviews (points 1-12 under “Review Content”), taking note of the example reviews (under “Examples of Review Content”). For your review, consider possible flaws including, but not limited to:

• claims that aren’t adequately supported by the experiments or theory
• missing experiments/theory that would have better supported the arguments in the paper
• skepticism about how the paper contributes to the agenda that motivated it
• disagreement with how the problem, or key concepts in the paper, were formulated
• confounds or alternative explanations of experimental results which they forgot to account for

⛏️ Archaeologist

After careful digging, you have unearthed this paper fully intact. Everyone wants to know how this paper relates to prior and future work in its field. Consider the state of knowledge at the time of publication, e.g. what uncertainties or misapprehensions was the paper meant to address? Find and report on one prior paper that substantially influenced the current paper and one newer paper that was substantially influenced by the current paper.

☕ Academic Researcher

As a researcher in this area, you’ve seen this paper have just gotten an idea for the next big thing. Propose an imaginary follow-up project that is only possible due to the existence and success of the current paper.

💰 Industry Practitioner

You have an idea for a new application or product (that has not already been mentioned by Industry Practitioners in prior sessions) based on this paper. Describe a convincing pitch for why you should be paid to make this application, and discuss at least one positive and one negative impact of it.

🕵️ Private Investigator

You are a detective who has been asked to run a background check on one of the paper’s authors (who hasn’t been investigated previously). Where have they worked? What did they study? What previous projects could have led to working on this current one? What motivated them to work on this project at all? Feel free to contact the author, but remember to be courteous, polite, and on-topic. Write that you’re in this seminar course, CC me, and include a link to this page.

Assignments

Below are your role-playing assignments:

Role-Playing Assignments