Usha Kumar
Lydia Manikonda
8715 Fall 2011 Midterm Critique
Based on your understanding of the Projects, You will have to review the progress of
two groups based on the following points:
Problem Motivation: What kind of research (e.g. Basic or Applied research) did the talk relate
to? If it was basic research what fundamental questions or open problems did the speaker relate
to? If it was applied research, what application use cases / examples/ questions did the speaker
relate to? Do they have societal significance/are they made up? If they are made up what are
some realistic application questions that can be addressed? Briefly explain within 75 words.
This project is related to The Arab Spring, a study done to evaluate the causes of revolts, revolutions and
regime changes in Arab regions. The main aim is to study the implications of these phenomena and
understand the reason for the wide spread effect in these region, so that one can understand the
different factors that lead to the revolt.
This is an applied research area and the important use of this study is to identify the various factors
which are responsible for the generation and spread of revolts and revolution and an in depth analysis
on this will provide a greater understanding of the circumstances that leads to civil unrest and help
predict or prevent such incidences. This problem has a greater societal significance as the world is a
small place now than it was before and events occurring in one part has a significant impact on the rest
of the world and information spread is quicker. Hence understanding the events that lead to Arab
spring like effect is very important. This study will also help devise a path to democracy at various
countries which are going through pro-domacracy revolts and also help promote equal rights and global
peace and stability.
Problem Statement: What research problem / software prototype did the talk attempt to solve /
build? Are the listed constraints reasonable? Why or Why not? Was the input / output well
defined or easy to understand via a simple example? (75 word limit)
This project is trying to come up with a set of well-defined causal variables which were responsible for
the start of revolt in Arab springs with the help of interviews, literature reviews and using CIA fact finder
country statistics. The input and output are very clearly defined. The main constraint here is in coming
up with a well-defined set of causal factors as well as in finding, out of the different causes like,
economic, political, technological and geographical factors which ones have a significant impact and
which ones are less significant.
Challenges: Are the challenges articulated clearly (and possibly illustrated via an example)? If
so, what are they and identify their category (e.g. computational, statistical, others)? Briefly
describe some improvements that can help articulating challenges easier? (75 Word limit)
Slide 4 says the main challenges are,
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Quantifying cultural/social factors into variables
Identifying a select set of socio-economic, political variables through CIA fact finder.
The main challenges faced are social in nature. Human behavior is another hard to define area.
Proposed Approach: Did the talk explain the key elements of the proposed approach clearly via
the use of suitable examples? If so what were the key elements? Did the proposed approach
honor all the constraints listed in the problem statement while achieving the goals listed in the
problem or were there some (simplifying) assumptions? If so, what were they? Briefly explain
(and possibly include suggestions to improve the proposed approach to solve the stated problem).
(150 Word Limit)
The talk provided a clear idea of the key elements involved in their proposed approach. The proposed
approach provided clear definition of the input and output and how the inputs are going to be collected
and also provided a clear idea about the taxonomy of the causes available during preliminary review.
Yes, it did take care of all the constraints by taking inputs from various sources like, face to face
interviews, literature surveys and facts book on different countries.
Though the presenters mentioned that these will be used as an input to a data mining machinery for
further analysis, they did not provide much insight into this aspect. Perhaps that is outside of this
projects scope. The one other thing is, though face to face interviews with students, professors and
journalists are helpful, it still is a subset of the population which is needed for analysis and may not be a
sufficient representation for the overall views from people of this region i.e. only the outside sources
and student population are considered to gather information related to the Arab region, better
approach would be to include people from the region in addition to students.
Novel/Better: Did the talk give a reasonable (e.g. thorough / acceptable) classification of related
work and identify their limitations via examples? Was the novelty of the proposed approach clear
from the classification scheme used in the talk? If not, how can it be improved? Did the talk
emphasize on how the proposed approach was better with respect to related work via additional
examples? If not, how can it be improved? (100 Word Limit)
Yes, the talk had included related work from 2 other literature reviews on Arab springs. The presenters
stated that their approach is novel because of the inter-disciplinary approach which spans multiple
disciplines are proposed by them. Though it was not mentioned in the presentation about how the
other approaches proposed are different from theirs, the assumption here is that the other two reviews
on related work did not follow an inter-disciplinary approach.
Validation: Did the talk provide hints about the validation methodology or provide examples to
validate their contribution claims? (50 Word Limit)
Yes, the presenters briefly touched upon this subject. They mentioned that once a set of variables have
been identified to be used in data mining algorithm for classification purposes, they plan to create a
map of the different variables for different regions. However, I am not sure how the authors are
planning to compare the results obtained by the algorithm to the real situation. My guess is that they
will use a test set, using Arab Springs effect as output, by feeding the variables they produce from Arab
Spring as input, so that they can verify their analysis results with an already known outcome. Also, it is
not clear to me, how the presenters are going to compare their output with the related work. Perhaps
providing more insight on this would improve more clarity in this area.
Presentation Critique: Rate the talk on a scale of 0(poor) to 10 (excellent) and provide a brief
justification (50 Words) while suggesting areas for improvement on the following:
Was the talk accessible to an "intelligent lay person"? 10, most of the slides were very well written
and presented the concepts very clearly.
Did the talk emphasize a central message that conveys the overall value of the work
being executed? 10, lots of slides visuals explaining the high level overview of the work
Did the talk attempt to relate to the audience and showed effort in conveying key ideas
clearly? 10
Was the speaker's response to questions satisfactory? 10
How did the talk do on covering the 6 elements? Kindly rate each element separately and
include a brief justification for each.
o Problem definition: 10 – to understand revolts etc to help create a peaceful society.
o Problem importance: 10, very much impacts the society.
o Problem hardness: 10, this is indeed a harder problem to solve, due to the human & social factors
involved.
o Description of Methods: 9, provided lots of insights on the overall concepts and how they will go about
implementing them. However, explanation of how each aspects will be classified are not provided. This
could be attributed to the timing constraint in the presentation.
o Novelty of methods: 9 – Novel thought to apply data mining to understand socio-economic-political
factors.
o How are the methods better? 9 – Hard to judge the outcome of these methods also not sure if the
data mining on these will bring out the desired results. Right measures for data mining are not
mentioned in the presentation.
Overall the presentation was a well done presentation with very much emphasize on making the key
concepts easy to understand for the audience.