Final-project-review

Review Form

Rate the project on each of the attributes below (1=worst, 5=best). Justify your choice with one or more sentences. Be kind. Negative reviews are much easier to accept if they sound constructive and enthusiastic instead of nasty, dismissive, or condescending. Find something good to say, especially if you need to say some strong negative things as well.

Presentation

1 2 3 4 5: Clarity of Writing It's very important that readers not be distracted by sloppy writing or confusing English. Documents should be spell checked and carefully proofed before being submitted. (1=needs substantial rewriting, 3=a few mistakes, 5=very well edited.)

1 2 3 4 5: Organization of the Report. Reading a good paper should be like hearing a good story; it's very hard to assess work from a quickly thrown-together collection of technical snippets. Does the paper clearly present and motivate the problem? Is it clear about what problem is being addressed? Does it motivate the methods being used? Can you tell at every point why the authors are saying what they're saying? (1=needs substantial reorganization, 3=sometimes unclear, 5=very well structured.)

1 2 3 4 5: Relation to prior research Science is incremental: we build on the work of others. Does the paper identify correctly relevant prior work? Does it discuss work that's relevant, even if that work was not presented in class? Does it discuss that work clearly and appropriately? (1=no prior work, 3=some citations, but still incomplete, 5=excellent connections to prior work.)

Work done on the project

1 2 3 4 5: Relevance of the project to the course Is the project relevant to the problem of learning from large datasets? Does it use scalable methods? Does it require scalable methods? Is it run on substantial datasets, or did it require substantial work to distill the data into a manageable form? (1=not really relevant, 3=marginally relevant, 5=very appropriate to the course)

1 2 3 4 5: Coherence of the Project Some projects are well-worked out investigations of a single idea, and some are a mismash of experiments with no apparent general theme. Independent of the presentation, how well-organized is the work? (1=random unrelated experiments, 3=not always clear why things were done, 5=very complete story.)

1 2 3 4 5: Quality of the Experimental Work Does the experiment answer a specific question? Is the measured quantity interesting? Are confidence intervals given? Are there multiple experiments to help prevent misinterpretation of results? (1=sloppy, 3=solid, 5=flawless.)

1 2 3 4 5: Scope of the Project Given the size of the team and their background, was an appropriate amount of effort expended for a four-week course project? (1=minimal error, 3=moderate effort, 5=very solid effort.)

Summary and Evaluation

• What are the greatest strengths of the project?

• What are the worst weaknesses?

A+ A A- B+ B- B B- C+ C- D F: Overall Recommendation for the Writeup

A+ A A- B+ B- B B- C+ C- D F: Overall Recommendation for the Work Done

Include any detailed comments you can make that might help the author improve the paper. Is this work submittable to a conference or workshop? If not, what might be done to make it submittable?