FYI, this paper was also presented Fall quarter in the cs291 course. Slides and other comments can be found on that web page:
http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~sjb/classes/fa01/cse291/

One of the things that I think this paper does best is incorporate three papers. In general, I think papers tend to focus on a single paper and improve on that topic, adding in additional papers here and there, but mainly focusing on the one paper. This paper seems to be unbiased towards the time spent on these three papers. The result, is a paper that provides a fairly solid background and analysis for the topic at hand.

The one drawback of this sort of multi-paper approach is that conference papers tend to be limited in length. The paper had two key goals: show the connections between the three (or four) papers and their methodologies and results and present an improved algorithm which was a combination of two of these. I think the paper did a good part for the first goal, but I would have liked to see a bit more analysis and development of their combined algorithm and the experimental results.