Review format

Reading, understanding, and reviewing papers will be your daily work as you get into research. It is an important skill to succeed in academia. In this course, we will read and discuss around 25 papers.

In each class we will review one paper (in some rare cases two papers).  You will have to submit a review of the paper on the Canvas discussion page.

Ideally, Your review should have four sections:

a. a brief summary of the paper (2-3 sentences),
b. 1-3 positive (no more than 60 words)
c. 1-3 negative points about the paper (no more than 60 words)
d.  Key takeaway for you from the paper. (If there is no worthy takeaways for you, you have to justify why.)

In addition, you must think/note about the following questions while reading/reviewing the papers. We will discuss them in the class.

1. What type of paper it is? measurement, system building, attacking existing systems, new algorithm design, theory, or others (you can create your own category as well.)
2. What is the threat model? Almost every security paper must have a threat model. Is it clearly stated in the paper? 
3. What is the main methodology the authors chose for evaluating the paper? How you would have done it? Or why do you think their approach is adequate?
4. What do you like about the paper? Did you learn something new form this paper?
5. What you dislike about the paper? or what you think could have done better/differently?
6. What are the follow-ups to this paper you can think of? Find your own follow-up ideas and then you can check with Google Scholar to see what are those.  Did you find your follow-up idea already published? No worries. Feel good about it, that it was a great idea, just someone got little ahead of you.