TJTS505: Master's Thesis Seminar Lecture 2: Find a good topic Dr. Shuaiqiang Wang Department of CS-IS, JYU

How to find a good topic A good topic is essential in research activities How to find a good topic? Discuss with your supervisors and other experts Look for topics by yourself Literature review is critical

Literature review levels Everybody knows it is important to review literatures According to your purposes, there are several levels to review literatures Level 1: Title, abstract, conclusions, importance (level of publisher, year, #citation, authors) Level 2: Introduction, related work, problem formulation and concept definition, theories and techniques in high level Level 3: Detailed theories and techniques, experimental setting and results, discussion Level 4: Sentence by sentence

Review literatures with purposes Level 1 & 2: Find your topics Level 2 & 3: Get familiar with your area, design your research plan, and write literature review Level 3: Implementations Level 4: Learn how to write scientific papers and theses

How to find a good topic? Know the leading conferences and journals in your research area Review recent papers and make notes Mainly depends on level 1: Title, abstract, conclusions, importance (level of publisher, year, #citation, authors) Partially with level 2: Introduction, related work, problem formulation and concept definition, theories/techniques in high level Draw spectrum pictures or tables Find your topic

Resources Google scholar: https://scholar.google.fi DBLP: http://dblp.uni-trier.de ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/ ACM Digital Library: http://dl.acm.org ACM: Association for Computing Machinery IEEE Xplore: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp IEEE: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Elsevier: https://www.elsevier.com/ Springer: http://www.springer.com/

What is a good topic? A hot topic vs. not very hot Significance of the problems Potential room for investigation Suitable is always better than perfect

Hot vs not so hot Hot topics Advantages Disadvantages Easy to get published Generally they are very important Potential to receive large attentions Disadvantages Need to compare with many existing studies Most likely it will be buried in numerous publications in the future Not so hot topics: opposite to hot topics

Significance of the problems The expected outputs of the research should be important in academic community or in industry, or both

Potential room for investigation Between the objectives of the problem and the existing results in literatures, there should be plenty of room for investigation For some problems, the current results are good enough, like fingerprint recognition. For some problems, they are relative easy to solve, and maybe we can only publish 1-2 papers at most This issue is not very important for master thesis, but very important for doctoral students

Suitable is always better than perfect You need to consider the following issues Your background and skills CS: Mathematics and programing skills IS: Management background Your supervisors’ research interests

Resources Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper: The C.A.R.S. Model http://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/CARS

homework Everyone: send your evaluation form to me which assesses your picked thesis Email: gpandey_01@yahoo.com Subject of your email: TJTS505:Thesis assessment + Your full name Deadline: 6PM Today (September 23) Demonstrate your evaluation results in groups (>=1) Find your group member who evaluate the same thesis Discuss your opinions in groups Oral presentation with slides Try to make your A4 research plan Subject of your email: TJTS505: A4 research plan + Your full name Deadline: 6PM, October 20

Any Questions?