[A1] Paper Reading and Reference Graph

1. Skimming the Paper List

Download all the papers from the Reading List. Read through all materials in Section 0 “must-reads”.

For each paper in the subsequent sections (50 papers in total), read the title and abstract to have a brief understanding of the research field, the research problem, and the claimed contributions. Don't worry if some parts are difficult to understand; a full comprehension of technical details is not necessary at this stage.

2. Identifying Relevant Papers

Identify one paper that is most closely related to your research topic (or you are most interested in) to serve as a seed. While it is recommended to choose your seed paper from the provided list, this is not mandatory.

Find at least 20 papers relevant to your seed by searching the references both backward and forward. Read the titles and abstracts of these papers to form a basic outline of the research field. Use resources like Google Scholar and online databases for your search.

3. Summarizing the Papers as a Diagram

Create a diagram that illustrates the relationships between the selected 20 papers. Each node in the diagram should represent a paper. The diagram must be generated from a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) source code (e.g., Mermaid.js, Tikz, graphviz, etc.).

Provide a Makefile to generate a PDF file from the command line. Submit both the diagram PDF and the scripts used to create it.

4. Reading the Papers

Set your long-term goal to to read through all the “relevant” papers to your seed and all the papers on the list throughout the semester, and gain a basic understanding of the concepts and standards of software/systems research.