CSC 590 Assignment 1 -- Research Summary

Slides: 7PM Saturday 19 April (Week 3ish)
Presentations: in class 11-12PM Monday 21 April (Week 4)
Summary and Refs: 11AM Monday 21 April (Week 4)

Written Summary

In this assignment you are writing an executive summary of your thesis research area, with supporting references. The summary must be no longer than one single-spaced 10-point-font page, including title lines, keywords, summary body, and bibliography.

The summary must cover these points:

1. A general description of the area, including why it's interesting.

2. A discussion of the major developments in the area, in chronological order.

3. Interspersed references to the most relevant work in the area, including what you believe to be the seminal work (if such work is readily identifiable).

Preceding the summary, supply two to five keywords for your area, in order of more to less relevant. Use the ACM keyword taxonomy to choose your keywords.

For the references, provide at least five, and no more than eight, highly relevant references from the literature. The references must be cited appropriately in your executive summary and compiled in a bibliography. Use CACM format for both the citations and bibliography entries. Major criteria for the relevance of a reference are how frequently it is cited by researchers in the area, and how positively researchers refer to it.

Your summary page must be formatted as follows:

See page 1 in the PDF version of the writeup for a clean formatting picture.

In a separate plain-text file, supply your cited references in BibTex format.

5-Minute Presentation

During the week 4 class period, you will give a brief oral presentation of your thesis work. The content of the presentation is based on your written summary. Since you have only 5 minutes for the presentation, you will not have time for a lot of detail. Your presentation should focus on identifying your topic and describing what is interesting about it. You can discuss some historical background and related work, but you will not have time to get into these topics as deeply as they are covered in the written summary.

The presentation has at most four slides and can last no more than 5 minutes. The first slide contains the following information:

See page 2 in the PDF version of the writeup for a clean formatting picture.

The remaining slides contain text and graphics you feel best convey your thesis work to an audience of your peers.

Additional Discussion

As you work on your summary, look for the following:

1. Who is currently "hot" in the area. This can be determined in the same way as assessing the relevance of a reference, namely, how often and how positively someone is referred to by other researchers.

2. Who are the foundational researchers in the area; if the area has been around for a while, these foundational people may or may not be currently hot (or even alive, alas).

3. What are the current "hot topics". A good way to discern these is to look at the topics discussed in the "Current or Future Research" sections of papers by "hot" people.

To obtain some useful guidance on these topics, consult with your thesis advisor and other faculty in the CSC department with research interests in your area. As a general courtesy, please visit the faculty during their regular office hours, unless you meet with them at other times on a regular basis.

For your presentation, you can think of it as follows: Suppose you're walking across campus, and a friend of yours from CSC asks "So, what are you doing for your thesis?". You have a few minutes to tell your friend about your work, as you're walking to your next class. (You're also both wearing heads-up display glasses, with wireless connection to the 590 wiki, so your friend can see your slides as you walk.)

Examples

Example summaries and presentation slides are posted on the 590 class website at ~gfisher/classes/590/examples/assignment1. Please note the some of the requirements for this year's assignment differ from previous years. This means that the format of the examples may not precisely follow the formatting and content guidelines in this year's writeup. Please do follow this year's guidelines for your work.

Schedule

The presentation schedule is available at http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~gfisher/classes/590/info/assignment1-presentation- schedule.html

Submit the three assignment deliverables to the 590 PolyLearn wiki, per the due-date schedule at the page in this writeup.