You can get one credit for participating by simply registering for CSE 652. You will be required to present one paper, and attend on a somewhat regular basis. If you don't register, you will get coerced into presenting one paper and attending on a somewhat regular basis. The choice is yours.
Since the group will be somewhat informal, the choice of topics or papers will depend upon the current interest of its members. I propose that we focus more on problem sessions than papers this semester. I also hope to see more continuity between problem sessions, so we continue to work between sessions to make progress. I also want to increase the percentage of ``theory papers'' vs. ``applications papers'' that are presented over recent years, to get us back to the core technologies we have evolved from.
My intention is to alternate between a variety of topics in algorithms this semester. Most of the papers will be from fairly recent conferences, particularly SODA, SOCG, FOCS, and STOC. We lean towards a grab bag of topics, particularly string algorithms / computational biology, and graph algorithms, to supplement our usual assortment of computational geometry.
If you are interested in one of these topics, why don't you volunteer to present it?