CS295J/Week 3.11

tuesday class notes

• discuss some of the most-discussable papers we presented thursday
  • Hua: Measuring effectiveness of graph visualizations: a cognitive load perspective Huang-2009-JIV
  • Caroline: Cognitive Strategies and Eye Movements for Searching Hierarchical Computer Displays
  • Steve: Toward a Perceptual Theory of Flow Visualization
  • Clara: Could I have the Menu Please? An Eye Tracking Study of Design Conventions

• what should we be doing with what we are discussing/learning? why are we doing this?
  • understanding area, understand what qualifies as research contributions, understand the lacey web of human knowledge
    • connection to other things we're reading
    • putting into wiki: very short summary,
  • relationship to proposal
    • hmm, maybe we need to go back and think about revision
    • what do we need to do for that?

• for Thursday: read reviews of proposal, identify some significant criticism, and say how it will be addressed in the revision

• • examples:
    • criticism: literature on XXX is not represented, here are 3 citations
    • response: we have reviewed the literature in this area and added a paragraph to the significance section relating our proposed work to that done in this area
    • criticism: the proposed approach won't work
    • response: we have 1) added a new section summarizing risks of the approach and contingencies if parts of the approach are not successful; 2) we have included preliminary results from 2 new experiments that show that YYY and ZZZ are likely to be feasible;
    • criticism: the intellectual merit of the proposed work is not clear
    • response: we have rewritten portions of the project summary and significance sections to clarify the intellectual merit of the work. Changed portions are in blue.
    • other examples? do one from the actual reviews?

• • let's put on the reviewer's hat to understand some guidelines for writing responses
    • 18 months ago read 10 proposals and wrote up evaluations of them, including yours
    • OR never read yours
    • now has your revised proposal and maybe the reviews from it
    • does NOT have the original version
    • needs to evaluate the revision
    • how?
      • A: find old one, read both in parallel, absorb everything, look through reviews, write up informed evaluation
      • B: go through points in review and check that they have been addressed
    • so write responses to make that as easy for the reviewer as possible
      • a checklist for them to use
      • annotate the review with responses interleaved
      • describe how a change to the proposal addresses the criticism
      • point to where the proposal was changed
      • don't repeat what's in the proposal in the response
      • try to address *every* criticism with a change
      • only argue in the response for the most important battles
      • make it easy for the reviewer to write "The revised proposal completely addresses all the concerns of the reviewers"
      • try not to make other changes that are not essential and that don't directly address reviewer criticisms
      • the exception to this is for new reviewer criticisms that you are reasonably confident you can anticipate