Homework : Computational & 3D Photography

Ongoing Assignments

Reading

Every lecture has a reading list from which you need to choose and read two papers. In addition you’ll have a personal project reading list of up to ten additional papers. You need to keep a web page which lists the papers you’ve read and has a one or two sentence summary of the paper as well as your personal review of the paper. These are meant to be brief and easy. They are also meant to make sure you actually read papers, and to get you thinking about what makes some papers good and some poor.

Presenting Papers

Every class there will be a lecture on issues surrounding the days topics given by the instructor. There will also be several roughly 15 minute presentations of individual papers given by students. We’re targeting 4-5 presentations per class, so if we had 8-10 students, you’ll be doing 1 per week. Since we couldn’t possibly all manage to read all the papers we’re leveraging each other. You’ll be getting exposure to lots of papers you don’t actually read. When your presenting you need to do a good job of explaining what the paper is about, showing results from the paper, and explaining how it is relevant to our class. In general you can expect that some but not all of the rest of the class will have read the paper (since each person was only required to read two papers for that class).

Specific Assignments

Experiment with a camera

Take a digital camera and produce 3 pairs of images (6 photos) which show how changing settings in the camera can affect the way the photograph looks. Try to keep the same composition in the photo (for instance by using a tripod). They should be recognizably the same photo, its just that they should have different artistic or informational quality because you’ve somehow changed the way the sensor works. For example you could change exposure, aperture, shutter time, flash, outside illumination, use filters. This isn’t meant to take a lot of time, but you should spend time composing/planning such that the photos are pleasing/artistic, don’t just shoot the pile of junk sitting on your desk. We’ll look at everyones photos in class.

Proposals / reading lists

By this point you should have teams chosen (2-3 people). Class projects chosen. A proposal for what you hope to accomplish approved by the instructor. In addition you should have a personal reading list of 10 papers that relate to your project. You can reuse papers you have to read for class anyway, but you’ll need to find some appropriate papers on your own as well. You should have read at least 2 of these papers by the day we discuss these proposals in class. The rest you’ll read over the course of the qtr. You should be prepared to explain your idea to the class using visuals if necessary.

Project progress discussion

We’re going to discuss progress in class. You should have made some progress or it will be very embarrassing.

Paper preliminary draft

A draft paper is due, written in the style of a conference paper. You’ll be missing some result of course, so you may have to put some fake results and guess about what your outcome will be in a few places. However the paper should be a complete paper that describes your work as if it was completed. You should be keeping in mind the criteria that you will be reviewed on when you write the paper.

Paper reviews

We’re going to practice peer-review on each others papers. You’re going to write a review of 3 of your classmates papers. Reviews will be anonymous to the authors, they’ll see your comments but not who wrote them. I’ll see who wrote what, so be helpful, critical if necessary, but polite. We’ll be talking about proper paper reviewing in class. The goal is to help your classmates improve their thinking, work, and writing.

Papers / mini-conference

Final version of the paper is due. At this point it needs to be both complete and true. All the guessing and fake images had better be gone. If something didn’t work out you’ll need to change the paper’s structure to reflect a new central point. However, no matter how much your partner flaked and the experiment failed, you’ll need to write something. We’ll have a mini-conference in class so that you can present your finished work to the class. This will give you a chance to practice describing and presenting your own work which you’ll find to be somewhat different than the presentations of other peoples work you’ve been doing all quarter.