The goal of this assignment is to look through the literature, find interesting research, and write a commentary about one paper that you found that you feel is noteworthy.

The most trustworthy sources of interesting articles are the proceedings of Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)  and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).

Most of these papers will also be posted on arXiv.org and it's fine to select a paper from arXiv, but since any crap can be posted on arXiv, please select only papers that have been peer reviewed and published, preferably in one of the proceedings above.

The only restriction on the paper is that it should address neural network models. Ideally, you will find a paper that is on a topic of interest to you and that might lead to a final project topic or a tie-in to your main research interest.  The paper can be on an application of neural nets or a more theoretical contribution. I would like you to pick some work we have not yet talked about in class, though it's fine if you cover articles I have on the syllabus for the last month of class.

I expect that half of your effort on this assignment will be on finding a 'just right' paper. Select wisely, and have fun looking through articles.

Your job is to read the paper and to write a commentary of no more than one page.  The commentary should include a summary of what you think the main or most interesting ideas are behind the work, However, there is no need to provide a complete abstract of the paper. I want to know your perspective on what the work had to offer, and how you'd explain it to a classmate.

The remainder of your commentary could include such reactions as: