XP33RG2 – Reading group

Responsible person: Jan Kybic

This is a reading group-type course aimed for PhD students. The students will present preselected scientific papers in front of their peers. We will study interesting or important papers in the field through moderated discussion. Seeing good examples should also improve our own writing.

After enrolling into this course, contact the organizer and let him know what your topic is and who is your supervisor.

• Each student will present at least one paper from a good journal or conference. The paper needs to be approved in advance by the organizers. The paper should be well written, present a significant contribution and be accessible even for non-specialists. The student will prepare a critical presentation of the paper of about 45min - highlighting the main ideas and answering questions. He will then actively participate in the discussion.
• Each student will prepare questions (will be an opponent) for at least two papers at least one weak in advance.
• Each student will take part in all presentations, will read all presented papers and will actively participate in the discussions.
• Students should keep a record of the scientific articles they read during the semester containing their own summaries and critical evaluations. Use whatever software you find appropriate (e.g. Zotero or Mendeley).

Organizers: Karel Zimmermann, Miroslav Kulich

Reading group takes place every Friday 9:00-10:30 either in KN:E-218 or JP:B-335 (CIIRC). The reading group schedule summarizes, dates, rooms, names and papers for all (past and planned) reading groups.

Credit requirements are as follows: Each student has to

• become presenter for one paper,
• become opponent for two additional papers,
• actively participate in other reading groups.

The role of the opponent is to read the paper and send non-trivial deep questions to the presenter not later than 1 week before the presentation. The role of presenter is to read a selected paper carefully, try to answer opponent's questions and present the paper to others. If the presenter is unable to answer opponent's question, he/she should clearly explain why the question cannot be answered.

Students can select a paper from top-tier conferences and journals such as TRO, IJRR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, PAMI, IJCV, NeurIPS, AAAI, IROS, ICRA, RSS, ICAPS. The selection should be consulted with student's supervisor and has to be approved by the teachers. When sending the paper for the approval, choose the right teacher based on their expertise Karel Zimmermann will mostly approve papers about the machine perception (e.g. convolutional networks, deep learning, SLAM), Mirek Kulich will approve papers about planning.

If you wish to become the opponent for a specific paper, put your name+email into the opponent column in the reading group schedule. Each paper can have two opponents at maximum, therefore if both slots are taken, you cannot become the opponent of that paper. Come up with deep questions which are interesting for a broad audience. Send questions to the presenter by an e-mail (cc to the teachers) and fill them into the corresponding opponent column (to be accessible to others) not later than 1 week before the presentation.