Research paper presentation

As part of this assignment, you are required to select a research paper relevant to the course topics, read it thoroughly, and prepare a brief presentation for the class. Your presentation should clearly summarize the main contributions of the paper, explain the problem it addresses, and discuss the significance of its findings. This task is designed to help you develop skills in critically reading academic literature and effectively communicating complex ideas to your peers. Please follow the PACES method when creating your presentation.

Submission

You are required to give the presentation during week 10’s lecture. A shared slide deck will be used so that the material and paper links can be shared easily with your classmates.

Finding a paper

Here are a few ways “dig around” and find a paper that matches your interests. In general, the first step is to find a general topic area, then find reserach groups working in that area, and then look at their recent publications.

Finding interesting topic areas

• There are some suggested readings or references scattered through the course notes.

• Look up recorded seminars, see which title and speaker resonantes with your interests (perhaps start off with the first 10-15 minutes).

  • Autonomy Talks

  • Stanford Robotics Seminar

  • UPenn GRASP Seminar and Talks

• Look at conferences and their list of workshop/sessions, and dig around those websites. NOTE: For IEEE conferences, try searching “IEEE ” to find the official IEEE page, and you should be able to access the paper with UW credentials.

  • Control conferences: American Control Conference, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control

  • Robotics conferences: IEEE International Conference of Robotics and Autonmation, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, International Symposium of Experimental Robotics

  • Aerospace conferences: SciTech Forum, IEEE Aerospace Conference

• Short list researchers by some fields

  • Control for autonomous vehicles

    • Dynamic Design Lab, Professor Chris Gerdes

    • MPC Lab, Professor Francesco Borrelli

  • Robotics and control for space

    • Autonomous control and Exploration Lab, Professor Abhishek Cauligi

    • Laboratory for Autonomous Systems in Exploration and Robotics, Profesor Keenan Albee

    • Space Rendezvous Laboratory, Professor Simone D’Amico

    • Autonomous Control Lab, Professor Behcet Acikmese

  • Safe autonomy

    • Interactive and Trustworthy Robotics Lab, Professor Andrea Bajcsy

    • Safe Autonomous Systems Lab, Professor Sylvia Herbert

    • AMBER Lab, Professor Aaron Ames

    • Control and Trustworthy Robotics Lab, Professor Karen Leung

Finding specific papers

• Once you found some researchers who you find do interest work, check out their webpage and publication list.

• There may be more videos from the researchers, so watch those including when they get into the details of the work a bit more. In the talk, they may reference papers.

• Google Scholar is a nice place to see the full list of papers from researchers, ordered by data or number of citations.

• Conncected papers is a nice place to visualize how papers are connected with each other. You can enter a paper and see what other papers it cites and is cited by. It may be useful to take a look papers that have a lot of connections.

• As you read a paper, it may cite important papers that it builds off from.

Accessing papers

• You can find many papers on ArXiv, a site where many research papers (including preprints and published works) are uploaded and free to access.

• UW pays for access to many journals/publishers, such as IEEE. So you can often pass paywalls by logging through your UW credentials. Alternatively, check out this tool from UW.

• For more recent papers, especially those closer to the machine learning, deep learning, and robotics areas, many papers often have project websites. You can often find links to the paper, code, and supplementary material there.

Resources on reading/writing research papers

• How to read/write a paper from AA 598, Karen’s special topics course Fall 2024

• Invited Talk by Cyrill Stachniss on How to Write Good Papers

• PACES method for reaching conference papers. Reading research papers may be a bit overwhelming if you are new to it. The PACES method are a set of questions you should try to answer when reading a paper.