Mid-term Report for CS364B (Foundations of Sponsored Search)

Length: 3-5 pages with reasonable spacing, margins, font size, etc. There are two parts to the report: Describing the papers that you read, and describing your intended project. One possible format for the report is as follows. Feel free to deviate from this list in any way that you think improves your report.

Paper Reports: For the paper reports: Your intended audience should be one of your classmates---a person who is extremely bright but not (yet) an expert in the area. One way to approach this is to imagine that you have to give a 10 minute talk in class, and then write up a transcript of what you would say.

• Statement of problems considered in paper(s) that you read, why they are (or in your opinion, are not) important. (1/2 page)
• Statement of results together with a discussion of the extent to which they address the issues that motivated the paper. Are you impressed with the results? What were the challenging parts of the solution? (1 Page)
• A list of things you did not understand from reading the paper(s). What are possible extensions? Would a different problem formulation and/or solution have been more interesting? (1/2 page)

• Describe and motivate your chosen project topic. Why is the problem interesting and/or important? What do you expect to learn/understand? (1/2 page)
• How do you plan to tackle the problem? (theory/simulations/online experiments) Why do you think this is the best way? Detail the steps you will take. (1 Page)
• Preliminary results (if you have some).
• What are possible outcomes of your project?

Note on reading papers: Research papers (especially conference versions) have a tendency to be hard to read, terse, and error-prone. We don't expect you to understand every last technical detail of the papers you're reading, but hopefully with a reasonable amount of effort you can develop a good understanding of the technical contributions.