how to read academic papers

How to Read Academic Papers?

Jia-Bin Huangjbhuang0604@gmail.com

http://jbhuang0604.blogspot.com/

January, 2011Taiwan

What this talk is about?Efficient and effective paper readingUseful websites, tools, tips you should knowA common sense talk

Paper reading and paper writing

"What’s the most resilient parasite?""An Idea.""A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An ideacan transform the world and rewrite all the rules."

Papers communicate ideasReading :: Writing = Extraction :: Inception

If You don’t read papers...

Outline

1 Deciding What to Read

2 Make the Best Use of Academic Resources

3 Reading for Breadth and Reading for Depth

4 Summary, Review, and Creative Thinking

Outline

1 Deciding What to Read

2 Make the Best Use of Academic Resources

3 Reading for Breadth and Reading for Depth

4 Summary, Review, and Creative Thinking

Deciding what to read

Why?Information explosion → too many papersOnly very few of them are helpful for your own research

Deciding what to read

How?Evaluate papers by their credibilitySelect papers by their relevance

Evaluate papers by credibility

How?Venue reputation (journal impact factor, conference ranking)Authors (who, affiliation, order, geneolgy)Completeness (reproducibility)

Select papers by relevance

The key questionWhy you want to read this paper? (What do you expect fromreading this paper?)

Select papers by relevance

Reasons to read papersGet to know a new problemDescribe current researchUnderstand a well-known algorithmFollow conventional experiment setupReplicate/extend the resultsLearn how to write

Get to know a new problem

Questions to askWhy is this problem important/hard?What is the problem setting? (input, output)Search : keywords + tutorial/lecture/course/video/introduction/wiki

Otherwise...

Describe current research

How?Find key papers and researchers in that areaSearch : keywords + survey/review/introduction

Understand a well-known algorithm

How?No need to read confusing technical papersSearch : keywords + tutorial/introduction/wiki

Follow conventional experiment setup

How?Each field has its own conventional experiment setup.

PSNR/Bit-Rate → image/signal compressionPrecision and recall/ROC curve → pattern recognition algorithmsConfusing/matching matrix → supervised/unsupervised learning

Search : keywords +experiment/setting/parameter/evaluation/quantitative/qualitative

Examples

PSNR-Bitrate ROC curve

Accuracy-Training size Confusion matrix

Replicate/extend the results

How?Papers may provide useful data (or state-of-the-art performance)and serve as building blocks in your researchSearch : keywords + suvery/review/benchmark/qualitative/study

Learn how to write

ResourcesThe Science of Scientific Writing by George Gopen, Judith SwanNotes on writing by Fredo DurandWriting Research Papers by Aaron HertzmanAdvice on Research and Writing at CMUHow to Get Rejected by Fabrice Neyret

Outline

1 Deciding What to Read

2 Make the Best Use of Academic Resources

3 Reading for Breadth and Reading for Depth

4 Summary, Review, and Creative Thinking

Make the best use of academic resources

Why?Well, I am a lazy graduate student...

Make the best use of academic resources

How?Seek other forms of research productStay updated

Seek other forms of research product

Publication may not be the only product of a research work.

What else?

Abstract Supplemental material

Presentation Demo video

Author webpage Project page

Code Dataset

Stay updated

How?Websites (research blog/preprint sites/author personal page)Mailing list subscription

Blog: a new research platform

ExamplesWhat’s new by Terence Tao, see also his google buzzGodel’s Lost Letter and P=NP by Dick LiptonMachine learning (Theory) by John LangfordNuit Blanche - compressive sensing newsScienceBlogs

Preprint: get access to the most up-to-date papers

ExamplesarXiv.org: e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science,quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statisticsSciweavers: academic bookmarking networkResource for Computer Graphics/Vision by Ke-Sen HuangAuthor personal page

Mailing list subscription

ExamplesImageworld: announce worldwide events and academic vacanciesMIT CSAIL SeminarUC Berkely computer vision mailing list

Outline

1 Deciding What to Read

2 Make the Best Use of Academic Resources

3 Reading for Breadth and Reading for Depth

4 Summary, Review, and Creative Thinking

Reading for breadth

Build a frameworkWhat did they do? (by skimming abstract, introduction, headings,graphics, definitions, conclusions and bibliography)Decide whether to go on

Reading for breadth

Order mattersExtract the high-level idea first, then the details

Reading for depth

Challenge what you readHow did they do it?How can I apply their approach to my work?

Reading for depth

Scientific skepticismExamine the (implicit) assumptionsExamine the methodsExamine the statisticsExamine the conclusions

Examine the (implicit) assumptions

Questions to askDo their results rely on any assumptions about trends orenvironments?Are these assumptions reasonable?

Examine the methods

Questions to askDid they measure what they claim?Can they explain what they observed?Did they have adequate controls?Were tests carried out in a standard way?

Examine the statistics

Questions to askWere appropriate statistical tests applied properly?Did they do proper error analysis?Are the results statistically significant?

Examine the conclusions

Questions to askDo the conclusions follow logically from the observations?What other explanations are there for the observed effects?What other conclusions or correlations are there in the data thatthey did not point out?

Outline

1 Deciding What to Read

2 Make the Best Use of Academic Resources

3 Reading for Breadth and Reading for Depth

4 Summary, Review, and Creative Thinking

After reading the paper...

How?React to what you readCreative thinking

React to what you read

Taking NotesHighlight major pointsReact to the points in the paperConstruct your own exampleSummarize what you read

React to what you read

Analogy: Gram-Schmidt process

Papers :: Reading = Vectors :: Orthogonalization

Extract the “innovation" of the paper.

Creative thinking

ResourcesHow to come up with new research ideas by Jia-Bin HuangHow to invent? Raskar idea hexagon by Ramesh Raskar

Creative thinking

Five ways to come up with new ideasSeek different dimensionCombine two or more topicsRe-think the research directionsUse powerful tools, find suitable problemsAdd an appropriate adjective

One example - Content-aware image resizing[Avidan and Shamir SIGGRAPH 2007]

IdeaResize (reduce/expand) images while preserving the imagecontent.The dimension: space

Video retargeting[Shamir et al. SIGGRAPH 2008]

IdeaExtend dimensions from 2D image to 3D video: image resizing →video resizingThe dimension: space

Nonchronological video synopsis and indexing[Pritch et al. PAMI 2008]

IdeaResizing (reduce) the temporal dimension.The dimension: time

Data-driven enhancement of facial attractiveness[Leyvand et al. SIGGRAPH 2008]

IdeaReshape the face to enhance attractivenessThe dimensions: distances between facial feature points

Parametric reshaping of human bodies in images[Zhou et al. SIGGRAPH 2010]

IdeaReshape the human bodies in imageThe dimensions: human shape

Multi-operator media retargeting[Rubinstein et al. SIGGRAPH 2009]

IdeaCombine seam carving with cropping and scaling to producebetter results

Regenerative morphing[Shechtman et al. CVPR 2010]

IdeaCombine two different problem: image morphing + image resizing

A Comparative Study of Image Retargeting[Rubinstein et al. SIGGRAPH 2010]

IdeaProvide the comprehensive perceptual study and analysis ofimage retargeting

PatchMatch[Barnes et al. SIGGRAPH 2009]

IdeaAdd constraint into the resizing processAdjective: Constrained

Motion-aware video resizing[Wang et al. SIGGRAPH 2010] [Wang et al. SIGGRAPH Asia 2010]

IdeaExploit motion information for better video resizing qualityAdjective: Motion-aware

References

Paper readingHow to read a paper by S. KeshaHow to Read a Scientific Paper by John W. Little and Roy ParkerEfficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology byMichael J. HansonHow to read a research paper by Michael Mitzenmacher

ToolsPublish or Perish (a program that analyzes academic citations)Mendeley (Academic reference management software)VideoLectures.NET (Free on-demand educational video lectures)

For more complete materials and explanations, please visit my blogRedefining Open Mind: http://jbhuang0604.blogspot.com/