Resources
A collection of resources I've found useful — for reading and writing papers, giving talks, and the tooling around them.
Reading & finding papers
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How to Read a Paper
S. Keshav's classic three-pass method for getting through a paper without drowning in it.
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Semantic Scholar
AI-assisted literature search with citation graphs and one-line summaries.
tool
NotebookLM
Upload papers and query them, or generate a podcast to digest them on the go.
Writing the paper
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Advice for Authors
Jacob Steinhardt's general but genuinely valuable advice on writing research papers.
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Planning Paper Writing
Devi Parikh on planning and scheduling the writing itself, not just the prose.
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Writing a Good Scientific Paper
Michael Black's 'the secrets I share with my students.'
slides
Writing a Good Research Paper
Vincent Lepetit's slide deck on what makes a paper read well.
guide
How to Write a Good CVPR Submission
Bill Freeman's notes on what gets a vision paper accepted. Valuable even beyond vision.
slides
How to Write an Introduction
Kate Saenko's system to nail the introduction.
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The Elements of Style
Strunk's timeless writing guide. The free Gutenberg copy is the 1918 original; the modern Strunk & White revision is the standard reference.
Figures & tables
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The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward Tufte's foundational book on showing data honestly and clearly. You'll never unsee a bad graphic again.
guide
How to Make Nice Tables
Markus Püschel's practical tutorial on tables that are easy to read.
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Better LaTeX Tables with Booktabs
Nick Higham on the same idea, with concrete booktabs examples.
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diagrams.net
Free diagram editor for figures and system sketches.
Writing tools & submission
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Overleaf
Collaborative LaTeX in the browser. The default for most groups.
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arXiv LaTeX Cleaner
Strips comments, unused files, and clutter before you upload to arXiv.
tool
Ghostscript
Shrink an oversized PDF from the command line (gs -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress …). Prefer vector graphics first.
Talks & posters
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How to Give a Great Research Talk
Simon Peyton Jones' guide to giving a talk that lands. I rewatch it before my own talks.
guide
Better Posters
The #BetterPoster approach: one big takeaway instead of a wall of text. A bit extreme as a template, but it nails the priority.
book
The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
Edward Tufte's critique of slide-think — how bullet-point decks degrade reasoning. (Paid booklet.)
Peer review & rebuttals
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How We Write Rebuttals
Devi Parikh's group on writing rebuttals that actually change a reviewer's mind.
guide
How to Be a Good Reviewer
CVPR tutorial (video + slides) on being the reviewer you wish you had.
Venues & deadlines
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AI Deadlines
Countdown to the major ML/AI submission deadlines.
tracker
Security Deadlines
The same, for the top security and privacy venues.
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confsearch
ETH's searchable index of CS conferences and their dates.
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CSRankings
Ranks institutions and researchers by publications at top venues. Handy when deciding where to apply.
Code & ML tooling
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The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
MIT's crash course in the tools every researcher should know: shell, git, debuggers.
tool
Typeguard
Runtime type checking for Python. Catches subtle errors plain annotations won't.
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jaxtyping
Shape- and dtype-annotate tensors (PyTorch, JAX, NumPy). Documentation and runtime checks in one.