Alec Jacobson and Colin Raffel make a convincing case that student presentations only engage very few members of class at a time, as it is naturally a few-to-many format. To fix this, they propose a many-to-many format: each student plays a specific role in the class discussion. Inspired by this, in this course in each class section except the first each student will take on one of the following roles:

👩‍🔬 Scientific Peer Reviewer

As a trusted reviewer for a top-tier conference/journal, this paper has just landed on your desk. You are tasked with carefully analyzing the paper as a peer reviewer. In a few paragraphs write a—critical but not necessarily negative—review of the paper following these guidelines for NeurIPS reviews (points 1-12 under “Review Content”), taking note of the example reviews (under “Examples of Review Content”). For your review, consider possible flaws including, but not limited to:

• claims that aren’t adequately supported by the experiments or theory
• missing experiments/theory that would have better supported the arguments in the paper
• skepticism about how the paper contributes to the agenda that motivated it
• disagreement with how the problem, or key concepts in the paper, were formulated
• confounds or alternative explanations of experimental results which they forgot to account for

⛏️ Archaeologist

After careful digging, you have unearthed this paper. Everyone wants to know how this paper relates to prior and future work in its field. Consider the state of knowledge at the time of publication, e.g. what uncertainties or misapprehensions was the paper meant to address? Find and report on one prior paper (not discussed in class) that substantially influenced the current paper or one newer paper (also not discussed in class) that was substantially influenced by the current paper.

☕ Academic Researcher

As a researcher in this area, you’ve seen this paper have just gotten an idea for the next big thing. Propose an imaginary follow-up project that is only possible due to the existence and success of the current paper.

📚 Theoretician

You are a theoretician interested in one of the key theory results of the paper. Write-up the proof of the result (either as a PDF handout or Google Slides) and explain it to the class.

These role-playing discussions are designed to be non-hierarchical: no role is more qualified to discuss the paper than any other role, they all provide a complimentary angle by which to analyze a paper.

The Week Before Class

Everyone starts by reading the corresponding papers. We will discuss two papers each class session, and each person will choose a role for each paper. Alongside reading the papers, you will do the following for each paper:

• Tuesday (end-of-day): Select your role
• Wednesday (end-of-day): Send 2-3 research questions based on your role for discussion