Hope everyone had a safe and relaxing summer! To schedule the 1-on-1 meetings in the Fall, please send me your course schedule by Saturday. I’m planning to continue the weekly group meeting (mainly for PhD students to report the research progress) and reading discussion meeting (to discuss new papers and brainstorm ideas). However, I’m not satisfied with the effect of these meetings in previous semesters. The goal of reading discussion is to discuss the most interesting and impactful papers that inspire new ideas, especially new task/approach design and research perspective. Many of you have such experience that when we design solutions to our own research, it’s difficult to come up with interesting and novel ideas with deep thinking. I hope we can improve this by (1) carefully selecting the papers that are really interesting and enlightening. This is a requirement for each presenter; (2) reading the papers before the meeting, actively and creatively thinking about and asking questions (e.g., what are the interesting ideas in this work, how did the authors developed the ideas and if you are the author how would you solve this problem, any better solutions to this problem, can the ideas be improved, what are their limitations, how to address the limitations, etc. You can find many tips for paper reading from online, e.g., tips, video). These brainstormings are very helpful to develop our research vision, grow to be researchers with critical thinking and perform cutting-edge research. Also, as PhD students, you should read papers everyday and read all the recent papers from arXiv and conference proceedings. This should not be pushed by me but actively done by yourselves. We will have a higher standard to our research starting from now on, and I will have higher expectation to each of you. I will discuss these more with PhD students. If you have any suggestions to make these research activities more effective, please feel free to let me know. --------------------------------- Lifu Huang Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech