How to Read Academic Papers?
              Jia-Bin Huang
         jbhuang0604@gmail.com
    http://jbhuang0604.blogspot.com/


              January, 2011
                 Taiwan
What this talk is about?
   Efficient and effective paper reading
   Useful websites, tools, tips you should know
   A 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 idea
   can transform the world and rewrite all the rules."

Papers communicate ideas
            Reading :: 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 papers
   Only very few of them are helpful for your own research
Deciding what to read




How?
   Evaluate papers by their credibility
   Select 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 question
   Why you want to read this paper? (What do you expect from
   reading this paper?)
Select papers by relevance




Reasons to read papers
   Get to know a new problem
   Describe current research
   Understand a well-known algorithm
   Follow conventional experiment setup
   Replicate/extend the results
   Learn how to write
Get to know a new problem




Questions to ask
   Why 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 area
   Search : keywords + survey/review/introduction
Understand a well-known algorithm




How?
   No need to read confusing technical papers
   Search : keywords + tutorial/introduction/wiki
Follow conventional experiment setup




How?
   Each field has its own conventional experiment setup.
       PSNR/Bit-Rate → image/signal compression
       Precision and recall/ROC curve → pattern recognition algorithms
       Confusing/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 research
   Search : keywords + suvery/review/benchmark/qualitative/study
Learn how to write




Resources
   The Science of Scientific Writing by George Gopen, Judith Swan
   Notes on writing by Fredo Durand
   Writing Research Papers by Aaron Hertzman
   Advice on Research and Writing at CMU
   How 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 product
   Stay 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




Examples
   What’s new by Terence Tao, see also his google buzz
   Godel’s Lost Letter and P=NP by Dick Lipton
   Machine learning (Theory) by John Langford
   Nuit Blanche - compressive sensing news
   ScienceBlogs
Preprint: get access to the most up-to-date papers




Examples
   arXiv.org: e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science,
   quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics
   Sciweavers: academic bookmarking network
   Resource for Computer Graphics/Vision by Ke-Sen Huang
   Author personal page
Mailing list subscription




Examples
    Imageworld: announce worldwide events and academic vacancies
    MIT CSAIL Seminar
    UC 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 framework
   What did they do? (by skimming abstract, introduction, headings,
   graphics, definitions, conclusions and bibliography)
   Decide whether to go on
Reading for breadth




Order matters
   Extract the high-level idea first, then the details
Reading for depth




Challenge what you read
   How did they do it?
   How can I apply their approach to my work?
Reading for depth




Scientific skepticism
    Examine the (implicit) assumptions
    Examine the methods
    Examine the statistics
    Examine the conclusions
Examine the (implicit) assumptions




Questions to ask
   Do their results rely on any assumptions about trends or
   environments?
   Are these assumptions reasonable?
Examine the methods




Questions to ask
   Did 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 ask
   Were appropriate statistical tests applied properly?
   Did they do proper error analysis?
   Are the results statistically significant?
Examine the conclusions




Questions to ask
   Do 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 that
   they 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 read
   Creative thinking
React to what you read




Taking Notes
   Highlight major points
   React to the points in the paper
   Construct your own example
   Summarize what you read
React to what you read




Analogy: Gram-Schmidt process




         Papers :: Reading = Vectors :: Orthogonalization

   Extract the “innovation" of the paper.
Creative thinking




Resources
   How to come up with new research ideas by Jia-Bin Huang
   How to invent? Raskar idea hexagon by Ramesh Raskar
Creative thinking




Five ways to come up with new ideas
   Seek different dimension
   Combine two or more topics
   Re-think the research directions
   Use powerful tools, find suitable problems
   Add an appropriate adjective
One example - Content-aware image resizing
[Avidan and Shamir SIGGRAPH 2007]




Idea
     Resize (reduce/expand) images while preserving the image
     content.
     The dimension: space
Video retargeting
[Shamir et al. SIGGRAPH 2008]




Idea
     Extend dimensions from 2D image to 3D video: image resizing →
     video resizing
     The dimension: space
Nonchronological video synopsis and indexing
[Pritch et al. PAMI 2008]




Idea
      Resizing (reduce) the temporal dimension.
      The dimension: time
Data-driven enhancement of facial attractiveness
[Leyvand et al. SIGGRAPH 2008]




Idea
     Reshape the face to enhance attractiveness
     The dimensions: distances between facial feature points
Parametric reshaping of human bodies in images
[Zhou et al. SIGGRAPH 2010]




Idea
     Reshape the human bodies in image
     The dimensions: human shape
Multi-operator media retargeting
[Rubinstein et al. SIGGRAPH 2009]




Idea
     Combine seam carving with cropping and scaling to produce
     better results
Regenerative morphing
[Shechtman et al. CVPR 2010]




Idea
     Combine two different problem: image morphing + image resizing
A Comparative Study of Image Retargeting
[Rubinstein et al. SIGGRAPH 2010]




Idea
     Provide the comprehensive perceptual study and analysis of
     image retargeting
PatchMatch
[Barnes et al. SIGGRAPH 2009]




Idea
     Add constraint into the resizing process
     Adjective: Constrained
Motion-aware video resizing
[Wang et al. SIGGRAPH 2010] [Wang et al. SIGGRAPH Asia 2010]




Idea
     Exploit motion information for better video resizing quality
     Adjective: Motion-aware
References


Paper reading
   How to read a paper by S. Kesha
   How to Read a Scientific Paper by John W. Little and Roy Parker
   Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology by
   Michael J. Hanson
   How to read a research paper by Michael Mitzenmacher

Tools
   Publish 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 blog
Redefining Open Mind: http://jbhuang0604.blogspot.com/

How to Read Academic Papers

  • 1.
    How to ReadAcademic Papers? Jia-Bin Huang [email protected] http://jbhuang0604.blogspot.com/ January, 2011 Taiwan
  • 2.
    What this talkis about? Efficient and effective paper reading Useful websites, tools, tips you should know A common sense talk
  • 3.
    Paper reading andpaper writing "What’s the most resilient parasite?" "An Idea." "A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules." Papers communicate ideas Reading :: Writing = Extraction :: Inception
  • 4.
    If You don’tread papers...
  • 5.
    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
  • 6.
    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
  • 7.
    Deciding what toread Why? Information explosion → too many papers Only very few of them are helpful for your own research
  • 8.
    Deciding what toread How? Evaluate papers by their credibility Select papers by their relevance
  • 9.
    Evaluate papers bycredibility How? Venue reputation (journal impact factor, conference ranking) Authors (who, affiliation, order, geneolgy) Completeness (reproducibility)
  • 10.
    Select papers byrelevance The key question Why you want to read this paper? (What do you expect from reading this paper?)
  • 11.
    Select papers byrelevance Reasons to read papers Get to know a new problem Describe current research Understand a well-known algorithm Follow conventional experiment setup Replicate/extend the results Learn how to write
  • 12.
    Get to knowa new problem Questions to ask Why is this problem important/hard? What is the problem setting? (input, output) Search : keywords + tutorial/lecture/course/video/introduction/wiki
  • 13.
  • 14.
    Describe current research How? Find key papers and researchers in that area Search : keywords + survey/review/introduction
  • 15.
    Understand a well-knownalgorithm How? No need to read confusing technical papers Search : keywords + tutorial/introduction/wiki
  • 16.
    Follow conventional experimentsetup How? Each field has its own conventional experiment setup. PSNR/Bit-Rate → image/signal compression Precision and recall/ROC curve → pattern recognition algorithms Confusing/matching matrix → supervised/unsupervised learning Search : keywords + experiment/setting/parameter/evaluation/quantitative/qualitative
  • 17.
    Examples PSNR-Bitrate ROC curve Accuracy-Training size Confusion matrix
  • 18.
    Replicate/extend the results How? Papers may provide useful data (or state-of-the-art performance) and serve as building blocks in your research Search : keywords + suvery/review/benchmark/qualitative/study
  • 19.
    Learn how towrite Resources The Science of Scientific Writing by George Gopen, Judith Swan Notes on writing by Fredo Durand Writing Research Papers by Aaron Hertzman Advice on Research and Writing at CMU How to Get Rejected by Fabrice Neyret
  • 20.
    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
  • 21.
    Make the bestuse of academic resources Why? Well, I am a lazy graduate student...
  • 22.
    Make the bestuse of academic resources How? Seek other forms of research product Stay updated
  • 23.
    Seek other formsof 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
  • 24.
    Stay updated How? Websites (research blog/preprint sites/author personal page) Mailing list subscription
  • 25.
    Blog: a newresearch platform Examples What’s new by Terence Tao, see also his google buzz Godel’s Lost Letter and P=NP by Dick Lipton Machine learning (Theory) by John Langford Nuit Blanche - compressive sensing news ScienceBlogs
  • 26.
    Preprint: get accessto the most up-to-date papers Examples arXiv.org: e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics Sciweavers: academic bookmarking network Resource for Computer Graphics/Vision by Ke-Sen Huang Author personal page
  • 27.
    Mailing list subscription Examples Imageworld: announce worldwide events and academic vacancies MIT CSAIL Seminar UC Berkely computer vision mailing list
  • 28.
    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
  • 29.
    Reading for breadth Builda framework What did they do? (by skimming abstract, introduction, headings, graphics, definitions, conclusions and bibliography) Decide whether to go on
  • 30.
    Reading for breadth Ordermatters Extract the high-level idea first, then the details
  • 31.
    Reading for depth Challengewhat you read How did they do it? How can I apply their approach to my work?
  • 32.
    Reading for depth Scientificskepticism Examine the (implicit) assumptions Examine the methods Examine the statistics Examine the conclusions
  • 33.
    Examine the (implicit)assumptions Questions to ask Do their results rely on any assumptions about trends or environments? Are these assumptions reasonable?
  • 34.
    Examine the methods Questionsto ask Did they measure what they claim? Can they explain what they observed? Did they have adequate controls? Were tests carried out in a standard way?
  • 35.
    Examine the statistics Questionsto ask Were appropriate statistical tests applied properly? Did they do proper error analysis? Are the results statistically significant?
  • 36.
    Examine the conclusions Questionsto ask Do 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 that they did not point out?
  • 37.
    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
  • 38.
    After reading thepaper... How? React to what you read Creative thinking
  • 39.
    React to whatyou read Taking Notes Highlight major points React to the points in the paper Construct your own example Summarize what you read
  • 40.
    React to whatyou read Analogy: Gram-Schmidt process Papers :: Reading = Vectors :: Orthogonalization Extract the “innovation" of the paper.
  • 41.
    Creative thinking Resources How to come up with new research ideas by Jia-Bin Huang How to invent? Raskar idea hexagon by Ramesh Raskar
  • 42.
    Creative thinking Five waysto come up with new ideas Seek different dimension Combine two or more topics Re-think the research directions Use powerful tools, find suitable problems Add an appropriate adjective
  • 43.
    One example -Content-aware image resizing [Avidan and Shamir SIGGRAPH 2007] Idea Resize (reduce/expand) images while preserving the image content. The dimension: space
  • 44.
    Video retargeting [Shamir etal. SIGGRAPH 2008] Idea Extend dimensions from 2D image to 3D video: image resizing → video resizing The dimension: space
  • 45.
    Nonchronological video synopsisand indexing [Pritch et al. PAMI 2008] Idea Resizing (reduce) the temporal dimension. The dimension: time
  • 46.
    Data-driven enhancement offacial attractiveness [Leyvand et al. SIGGRAPH 2008] Idea Reshape the face to enhance attractiveness The dimensions: distances between facial feature points
  • 47.
    Parametric reshaping ofhuman bodies in images [Zhou et al. SIGGRAPH 2010] Idea Reshape the human bodies in image The dimensions: human shape
  • 48.
    Multi-operator media retargeting [Rubinsteinet al. SIGGRAPH 2009] Idea Combine seam carving with cropping and scaling to produce better results
  • 49.
    Regenerative morphing [Shechtman etal. CVPR 2010] Idea Combine two different problem: image morphing + image resizing
  • 50.
    A Comparative Studyof Image Retargeting [Rubinstein et al. SIGGRAPH 2010] Idea Provide the comprehensive perceptual study and analysis of image retargeting
  • 51.
    PatchMatch [Barnes et al.SIGGRAPH 2009] Idea Add constraint into the resizing process Adjective: Constrained
  • 52.
    Motion-aware video resizing [Wanget al. SIGGRAPH 2010] [Wang et al. SIGGRAPH Asia 2010] Idea Exploit motion information for better video resizing quality Adjective: Motion-aware
  • 53.
    References Paper reading How to read a paper by S. Kesha How to Read a Scientific Paper by John W. Little and Roy Parker Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology by Michael J. Hanson How to read a research paper by Michael Mitzenmacher Tools Publish or Perish (a program that analyzes academic citations) Mendeley (Academic reference management software) VideoLectures.NET (Free on-demand educational video lectures)
  • 54.
    For more completematerials and explanations, please visit my blog Redefining Open Mind: http://jbhuang0604.blogspot.com/