The background accumulates as you thoroughly read them. You can understand a lot without knowing all the specifics. The good papers will usually explain the challenges, approaches so far, their weaknesses, their solution, and future work that's essentially the solution's weaknesses. One can get pretty far with that. Even formal verification papers were easy to follow on general idea of their methods or results without know the specialist stuff. Same with digital design. I only started getting slowed down, ineffective, or stomped when it was about analog or RF papers. It's why I keep saying one might not be able to cheat those. Not entirely, anyway: my abstract predictions of techniques like A2, the fab material mod, semi-automated synthesis with stochastic methods, or chaining gates together in tamper-resistance show my almost detail-less mental model is still better than nothing. I already had mitigations for two just guessing something might happen with that mental model. ;)
True, but reading the intro and background/prior work sections takes approx. 5-10 minutes. And depending on the length of the paper, these sections may be pretty succinct and therefore not very helpful to a reader unfamiliar with the state of the art.
I agree. You can usually understand the general contributions and how they work at a high level pretty easily. But intuitively and deeply understanding a paper takes much more time from my experience. Again, YMMV.
I also have almost zero experience with analog haha! I'm going to be taking an intermediate course on analog circuits next semester. I'm interested in jumping into the field of analog hardeare security, so it's a necessary first step.
I recall watching a recent talk by Andrew Ng who mentioned that reading research papers is a key method in improving as deep learning specialist / data scientist, but that one should temper their expectations of knowledge acquisition. One might spend a Sunday trying to go deep into a paper, but at the end of the weekend that person may barely get much out of it. He even admits that sometimes it takes him a couple reads over a course of several sessions to fully grasp a new concept. Which isn't all that surprising given the information asymmetry between the authors and the reader.
