Introduction

In this milestone, we will put together the literature review related to your proposal. This part of the paper is essential for you to convince the reader of the value and feasibility of the project, if you do not do this well, then it will be extremely unclear if your proposed work has already been done or if it is feasible at all. You should NOT summarize ALL the details from all the papers you examined. You should instead SYNTHESIZE the general takeaway from the papers you examined and provide details that are relevant to your project proposal. Finally, this review should expose a “gap” of work that has NOT been done (and which you would address by the work proposed in your final proposal).

Step 1: Reading the papers

Obviously, the first thing you ought to do is to read the papers that you have identified in milestone 1. Again, here are a few guidelines to help you read your papers:

For each paper, write down the following:

  1. Motivation: 1 sentence summary of the major motivation of the paper.
  2. Research Question: 1 sentence statement of the question.
  3. Main Finding: 1 sentence summary of the main finding of the paper.
  4. Supplemental Finding (if any): 1 sentence summary per supplemental finding.
  5. Methods or Design: What are the stages of the research or the designs proposed?
  6. Conclusion: 1 sentence conclusion.
  7. Future Work: 1 sentence summary of future work suggested by the authors, if any.

Step 2: Writing the literature review

As stated above, the goal of the related work section is to synthesize the ideas and research contributions of each paper that you have read. Then, you are to use the results and contributions of the authors to identify a gap in the field and then propose a way to build on top of the previous work and address the problem identified.

This is not a per-paper summary section, it is rather a way to present to your readers the state of the art research in your field and it contributes to your idea and how it differs from it. This is not a critique of previous work, in the sense that your goal is not to undermine previous research. Rather, you are standing on the shoulders of giants, it is your job to pay your respects to the previous researchers and identify an incremental idea where you can contribute to the field.

Submission

  • Milestone 2 is due on Sunday, May 15 at 11:59 pm.
  • Submit a single PDF document to gradescope that includes:
    • Your names
    • The title of your research
    • Your literature review section
    • An appendix that contains your work on step 1 for each paper that you read.
  • You related work section should be no less than one and half pages.