Reading Summaries

For each assigned reading, students will submit a summary in advance (by 9 AM day of presentation). Reading summaries are a great way contextualize and process what you have just read, and doing so will help you prepare for the class discussion. Each summary is to be done individually.

Length: There are no length requirements for a summary, but around a half-page (~250 words) is a reasonable target. Quality is preferable to quantity.

Content: At a minimum, the summary should describe the main contribution of the paper and provide some analysis (strengths and weaknesses). Feel free to elaborate how you see fit. You may want to consider:

- What workload assumptions is the paper exploiting?

- Is there a significant limitation that the paper doesn't state?

- How might you improve the research ideas?

- How might you improve the explanation of the research ideas?

- What is the context in which they intend their accelerator to operate, and how well does it match that?

- What might be an interesting extension to the paper?

- How does this paper connect to your research?

- What did you learn from this paper?

- After looking things up, is there anything you still find confusing?

Submission: online via Canvas by 9:00 AM the day the paper is presented (no late submissions)

Grading: Summaries will be graded on a 2-point scale: satisfactory summaries receive 2 points, unsatisfactory summaries receive 1 point, and missing or late summaries receive 0 points.

Exemplary Summary: An especially good summary can receive 3 points, but the summary must provide significant intellectual depth and will typically be longer. Extra points accumulated from exemplary summaries are intended to offset points lost to unsatisfactory or missing summaries, and cannot cause the reading summary subtotal to exceed 100% for the final grade.