So NPR has this nifty segment called "You must read this" (
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5432412 ) which gets writers and authors to recommend books that they think others should read.
Your last "homework" assignment for this course is patterned after it.
Here is the assignment:
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1. Look at the papers being presented at the World Wide Web Conference this week
(the program --along with most of the pdf files--is available at
http://www2010.org/www/program/papers/ ; if you are interested in a particular paper but the pdf is not available, you can probably google the authors' pages--technical paper authors tend to be a narcissistic bunch and will put every paper up on their web page as soon as it is accepted ;-)
2. Check out the "abstracts" of the papers whose titles seem interesting to you based broadly on the aims of this course.
3. If you like the abstract, try reading the introduction (optional, but recommended).
4. By 5/11, post a short comment in response to this article giving
4.1 paper title and link to its pdf
4.2. why you would like to read it and/or why you think others in the class should read it
4.3. how the paper is connected to what we have done in the course (you could also phrase this as a recommendation
"if you liked that power iteration discussion, you will probably like this paper as it gives ways to speed the
convergence"
(your inputs to 4.2 and 4.3 can be interleaved).
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Here is the rationale for the assignment--unlike Physics 101, after which you don't expect to be able to read the state of the art papers, this course is about an area that is very much recent and in progress (recall the farside neanderthal archeologist cartoon..). So, you actually
do have a shot of understanding the directions of most working being done at the state-of-the-art (and in some cases even understand their contribution).
Rather than ask you to take this assertion at face value, I would like to encourage you to "do it" and thus "see it to believe it" as it were ;-) [Plus, this is a rather cheap way for me to figure out which WWW papers to read.]
Rao