Presentation. The main course requirement is to select a topic and give a presentation based on two papers on the topic. The instructor and TA will meet with each student to help with the preparation, and ensure that the resulting presentation will be interesting and accessible to students in the class who are not experts in the given topic. Most of the topics have a strong algorithmic flavor, but some topics are more geared towards biology. To sign up for a presentation, you need to pick a topic and a date. Consult the topic list and the schedule, and then email both the instructor and the TA with subject "CS374, signing up for presentation", listing your choices in order of preference. Requests are handled on a first-come first-serve basis, and therefore you are encouraged to provide us with more than one choice.

Scribing. The second requirement is scribing a lecture. Lecture notes should provide students who are taking the class a useful resource for remembering the material presented. Ideally, lecture notes should be written up in a way so that they are readable by students of next year who did not necessarily read the papers that were presented. To sign up for scribing a lecture, consult the schedule and then email both the instructor and the TA with subject "CS374, signing up for scribing", listing your choices in order of preference. Once again, requests are handled on a first-come first-serve basis. Refer to the sample entry for an example of how lecture notes should look like in terms of format and organization. We suggest preparing your notes in Microsoft Word using the aforementioned sample as a template. Your notes are due one week after the lecture, and they should be submitted by emailing a PDF file to the TA; you can also submit any other popular format (Microsoft Word, Postscript) and in this case it will be converted to PDF by the TA. Keep in mind that your notes constitute an original text; verbatim copying from any sources is not allowed.

Summary. As a third requirement, you need to select two lectures: one of lectures 3 to 14, and one of lectures 15 to 26. For each lecture, you have to find one paper in addition to the two presented; the paper must be related to the topic and relatively recent (after 2001). Then, you must write a single-page summary of what the paper presents and how it relates to the other two. Refer to the sample entry for examples of how the summary should look like in terms of format and structure. Each of your two summaries is due one week after its respective lecture, but it may appear online later, as you may be asked to perform some editing (if necessary).