CSCE 410/810

Seminar Assignment

February 29, 2008

Problem

For the seminar assignment, the goal is to train you on conducting a specific literature review on a particular topic (IR-related, in this case), presenting a succinct, coherent, and logical review, and holding a Q&A seminar to answer questions from your peers and from me.

Each student is required to present on a specific and different track of the TREC conferences. Check out http://trec.nist.org for more detailed information on each track. The tracks available for this assignment are: Legal Track, Blog Track, Enterprise Track, and Genomics Track.

This assignment counts 10% towards your grade.

Requirements

Each student is required to give a presentation of no more than 40 minutes and hold a seminar (~10 minutes) afterwards. Your classmates are required to ask questions at the end of your talk and I will also ask some questions as well. Note that all students are required to participate in the Q&A. That is, while one student is holding a seminar, the other students are required to ask questions. Their participation will count towards the “Q&A and Participation (20%)”.

For each TREC conference, there has been always a rather comprehensive summary for each track. These are available to you online. Meanwhile, there are also many papers under each track. For tracks that appear in several TREC conferences, you should do a summary of all those conferences. You may use each TREC’s track summary to help you organize your presentation and supplement the summary with your own review of other papers. The more papers you review, the better your presentation should be. (Notes: You are allowed to use papers other than TREC conferences’.)

Schedule

There are three time slots towards the end of the semester. For each time slot, only one student will present. I will e-mail you with the time slots and you are required to em\-mail me your choice.

Grading

(1) 45% Summary of the TREC track

(2) 20% Organization (Time management, flow of presentation, poise, etc.)

(3) 15% Conclusions (Comparisons, insights, etc.)

(4) 20% Q&A and Participation