I always wish I could read research papers and get anything interesting out of them, but 9/10 I lack any of the prerequisite knowledge to understand anything I read.
I'm old enough to admit this....I don't actually dig into the papers very deeply, unless I have the prerequisite background.
if its close enough to my area, I can usually get a lot out of reading the exposition, skipping the parts that don't make any sense to me (especially the math).
I suppose it's like eating salt crackers with powdered iced tea at a Michelin restaurant...but I've still learned a lot.
if you float an area you're interested in, I'm sure people would be happy to give recommendations. a lot of the more influential CS papers are not only novel and interesting, but also very accessible. (I guess except paxos...once you boil away all the stuff its really simple underneath)
It gets pointlessly added in lots of places nowadays. Does anyone here even have more free time due to the lockdown? IT work is fairly conducive to being done from home. And given that we end up supporting other staff, I've been really busy this past few weeks.
>Reading white papers is a skill in its own, but as almost anything else, it can be learnt.
I'm currently taking this great course [1] with Dave O'Hallaron (co-author of Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective / the 213 textbook [2]), in which we read and discuss papers about building scalable Internet services (list of papers available on the site).
As part of the course we write critiques of each paper, including a quick summary and some notes about likes, dislikes, and questions for discussion. Taking the time to write this out explicitly really forces me to think more deeply about what each paper is about.
And, the reading-group format with discussion with other people is helpful - hearing different perspectives and opinions really improves my understanding as well.
I'd definitely recommend taking notes and trying to find a reading group for better understanding. As other comments have mentioned, Adrian Colyer's The Morning Paper [3] also has interesting reads.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 30.5 ms ] threadhttps://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
Good example of someone who is smarter than you, dear reader, and can argue either side of a technical argument convincingly, even to himself.
if its close enough to my area, I can usually get a lot out of reading the exposition, skipping the parts that don't make any sense to me (especially the math).
I suppose it's like eating salt crackers with powdered iced tea at a Michelin restaurant...but I've still learned a lot.
if you float an area you're interested in, I'm sure people would be happy to give recommendations. a lot of the more influential CS papers are not only novel and interesting, but also very accessible. (I guess except paxos...once you boil away all the stuff its really simple underneath)
And my own meta-list of distributed systems reading lists. Old links, no shortage of caveats left as an exercise for the reader.
https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368
http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/guidehciseresearch.html
I'm currently taking this great course [1] with Dave O'Hallaron (co-author of Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective / the 213 textbook [2]), in which we read and discuss papers about building scalable Internet services (list of papers available on the site).
As part of the course we write critiques of each paper, including a quick summary and some notes about likes, dislikes, and questions for discussion. Taking the time to write this out explicitly really forces me to think more deeply about what each paper is about.
And, the reading-group format with discussion with other people is helpful - hearing different perspectives and opinions really improves my understanding as well.
I'd definitely recommend taking notes and trying to find a reading group for better understanding. As other comments have mentioned, Adrian Colyer's The Morning Paper [3] also has interesting reads.
[1] http://course.ece.cmu.edu/~ece845/
[2] http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/
[3] https://blog.acolyer.org/