15-869 B Administrative Information for Spring 2014

Grading Information

• 10% Class participation
• 20% Blog / web page
• 20% Paper presentation
• 15% Project proposal
• 35% Final project

Notes for the Paper Presentation

You will have 30 to 40 minutes to present your paper. Aim to fall within this timeframe including discussion and questions (which you should encourage). Thirty to forty minutes is a lot of time. It is significantly more time than the authors had to present their papers at whatever conference they may have appeared. You have time to develop some amount of technical detail. However, you probably cannot cover all of the detail in the paper, so you have to make some careful choices about what to talk about and what not to talk about. If you are unsure about how much detail you can hope to cover, first devise a tentative plan and then come talk to me.

I expect your talk to go generally like this. Depending on the topic of the paper, the approach of the authors, and your own personal style, you will probably have to adapt my guideline below. In particular, I've put some possible timing information just as a rough guideline, but this will vary a lot from paper to paper and presentation to presentation.

• (2 minutes) Where did this paper come from? Where was it presented, who are the authors, what inspired you to have a look at this paper?
• (2 minutes) What is the overall big picture motivation of the authors? What seems to be driving them to pursue this research?
• (1 minute) What did they actually achieve? You can show part of the video here to give people some idea of what to expect.
• (5 minutes) Now, you can give some background. This will come from the paper's related work section. Probably a whole lot of other people have tackled this problem. If you'd like, you can briefly show some of previous work. Then, try to state the precise contribution of this paper beyond previous work in your own words. If it is a really top quality paper, the authors will have made this easy for you.
• (5 minutes) Now we are heading into the core part of the paper. You can start by giving the problem definition very precisely. Think inputs, outputs, system overview diagram, whatever will help us understand the exact way in which the authors think about this problem.
• (10 minutes) Now that we understand the problem statement, tell us how they solved it. Try to do this in a top-down way, focusing on the most interesting and important parts and only introducing detail as necessary. Use lots of pictures and diagrams here.
• (5 minutes) Onto the results. How did the authors validate their approach? Did they compare against alternatives? Did they simply show videos? Did they test for statistical significance? Did they compare against the real world? Show the key outcomes of the algorithm or study. You may want to segment up their video and/or separate out their results figures into subsections to help you better present it, or you may find it works ok to show everything at once.
• (5 minutes) Now discuss. The authors will have their own discussion points, but make this section your own. Did the authors achieve what they originally set out to do? If you could summarize this paper in just a few words, what would they be? What is good and bad about the approach? What questions were raised in your mind? What limitations did you see, and what opportunities for future work?
• Make sure you invite questions, not just now at the end, but along the way as well.

Resources

The SMARTBODY system

The DANCE software system

To my knowledge, all three of these projects use the Open Dynamics Engine

Another simulator that we have been using recently is Bullet.

There are a number of other academic based simulation engines you can play with, including RTQL8 developed by Karen Liu's team at Georgia Tech, MuJoCo, developed by Emanuel Todorov's group at the University of Washington, and Klamp't, develped by Kris Hauser at Indiana University. More are showing up all the time, so you may find yet another system that looks promising!

The CMU motion capture database is a good source for motion capture data

The software tools on the CMU website may be useful for viewing motion capture data and making kinematic edits, but do not have an integrated physics engine. Doing so would be a substantial project.