My problem is going from:

Reading and understanding a paper => Implementation

Let's take a few papers as examples:

- Gorilla http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1816-teller.pdf

- Dremel https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/36632.pdf

- Hokusai http://www.auai.org/uai2012/papers/231.pdf

I've tried to read those papers and implement some basic code, but I have no idea where to start. I've gotten so used frameworks that document each piece of the beast, as well as code to back it up, that I don't know how to understand a paper from a "conceptual" level.

This feels like a deeper skill that I'm missing. Any thoughts?