Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 1 Lecture 1 Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 2006 PSU - OHSU All material © 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000 David Maier Lecture 1: Course Overview, Background Research

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 2 Lecture 1 Acknowledgements Many thanks to David Maier who first developed this course. Many of the slides presented here were based upon slides developed by David Maier. Suggestions for improvement and additions came from Tim Sauerwein & Walid Taha Additional material Todd Leen Tim Sheard

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 3 Lecture 1 Course Mechanics Instructors Tim Sheard Todd Leen BCB 150E , (FAX) Time: Winter Quarter –Tuesday / Thursday 2:00 – 3:20 pm. –Classroom –OND 220 –Class Web page

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 4 Lecture 1 Grading Scheme No Exams Exercises Due one class after assigned, graded on a check off basis Projects Six projects: annotated bibliography 2-page summary of a research paper Revision of 2-page summary 5-minute presentation of a paper pp paper on a technical topic 15 minute presentation based on paper above Presentations outside of regular class hours, all invited to attend. One week or more each Graded with points

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 5 Lecture 1 Grading Tentative Grading Scheme Exercises 10% Projects 90% Bibliography 15% 2-page summary 15% Revision of 2-page summary 10% 5-min. Presentation 10% page Paper 25% 15-min. Presentation 15%

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 6 Lecture 1 Texts Required Texts: –Lyn Dupre’. Bugs in Writing: A Guide to Debugging Your Prose (2 nd edition). Addison- Wesley, ISBN X Other Useful Books – see syllabus –Mark Zobel. Writing for Computer Science. Springer ISBN

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 7 Lecture 1 Policies: All deadlines are firm. We will be as flexible as possible in accommodating special circumstances; but advance notice will make this a lot easier. We follow the standard OGI guidelines for academic integrity. Discussion is good. Items turned in should be your own, individual work. Be extremely careful to avoid plagiarism – anything copied verbatim from another source must have quotations and a citation. Paraphrasing and representing someone’s ideas as your own are also plagiarism.

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 8 Lecture 1 Academic Integrity Students are expected to be honest in their academic dealings. Dishonesty is dealt with severely. Homework. Pass in only your own work. Writing assignments. Students are expected to do their own writing. Critique of your writing by others is OK, but you must fix your mistakes on your own.

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 9 Lecture 1 Projects Projects involve a technical topic of your own choosing, reporting on prior work in that topic area. Bibliography –A bibliography of at least 10 references in your topic area. Citations and short written descriptions of each paper. 2 page summary –2-page (~900-word) summary of one of the papers from your bibliography Revision of 2-page summary

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 10 Lecture 1 Projects 5-min. Presentation –A short (five-minute) presentation that corresponds to your summary paper (Project 2). Presentations will be scheduled outside of class time page Paper –A background paper on a technical topic of pages (~5000 words). It should be a complete paper with abstract, introduction and conclusions. 15-min. Presentation –Prepare and deliver a 15-minute presentation corresponding to your background paper

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 11 Lecture 1 Purpose of Course Make you better scholars better researchers better writers better presenters better reviewers Especially writing, and oral presentation

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 12 Lecture 1 Learn to communicate Written papers and articles How to read How to write How to judge the writing of others Oral Presentations How to organize an oral presentation How to present an oral presentation How to listen to an oral presentation

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 13 Lecture 1 Why Do Background Research? Learn an area — Not everything is in your textbooks –Concepts, terminology –What are the important issues? –What are the main techniques? e.g. modeling, simulation, proof techniques, statistics, algorithms Who are the important people in the area? –Where do they work? –What conferences do they attend?

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 14 Lecture 1 Why Do Background Research? To find a problem to work on –What parts of a field are active –What do people consider "today's" significant questions? It is the custom of the modern Scientists –What kinds of papers: theoretical, analysis, simulation, implementation, experience reports. –What forms do they take “Cultural” enrichment

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 15 Lecture 1 Why Do Background Research? To situate your own work – What are the trends in the field? –How does your work differ from the work of others? –Are you going against the grain? Avoid repeating the work of others –Most forums for research require novelty –except, survey papers Find Current state of the art – Avoid getting scooped

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 16 Lecture 1 Background Research Finding relevant material No single source that you can rely on You have to use a combination of approaches Not everything is on the web not everything on the web is valuable – no quality control!

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 17 Lecture 1 Direct Search Library –Books –Proceedings (newest material, shortest time delay) –Collections of papers (i.e. reprints, ACM Comm. first 25 years) –Journals often have an annual index on-line search of journal index very common Some journals have back issues on line (ACM digital library)

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 18 Lecture 1 Direct Search Others’ offices, group libraries –Who subscribes to what? –Who goes to which conferences? Research group files I usually try to find a recent article first, Chaining backwards – can be easier than chaining forward CiteSeer is useful for chaining forward. (Also Science Citation Index.)

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 19 Lecture 1 Indexing and Abstract Services Current Contents –Table of Contents are now often on-line ACM Guide to Computing Literature –Annual volumes On-line indexing services searchable via author, title, keywords sometimes include complete abstracts Citation Indexes –i.e. "Science Citation Index“, Citeseer –limited to what they index

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 20 Lecture 1 Organizing what you find At some point, I try to identify the earliest articles in a field –Sometimes these are the seminal works –other times, later works are more organized and make a better introduction – e.g. review articles What are the most often cited works? –Oft cited works are probably important works –Google.com ranks papers found in a search by how often they are cited Start trying to determine seminal papers, definitive references –How do the papers fit together? –Make a dependency graph of what papers cite others. This helps you view the development of a field

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 21 Lecture 1 Leveraging What You’ve Already Found Bibliographies of books and articles already obtained Survey articles –ACM Computing Surveys Bulletins and notices –ACM SIGS –IEEE technical committees –bibliographies –research group archives IEEE Computer

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 22 Lecture 1 The Internet Newsgroups –DB/LP (database and logic programming) –comp.lang.functional (compilers/languages/functional) Web pages Research groups General sources — on-line bibliographies Directories and search engines National tech report library (NCSTRL) Computing Resource Repository (CoRR) Mailing lists –more relevant than newsgroups usually

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 23 Lecture 1 The Internet Solicitation On newsgroups In mailing lists Make sure that your questions are appropriate — give addresses for and regular mail Might ask if there is more recent work If you have a technical report that is more than a few months old, highly likely that has been published someplace and possibly revised

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 24 Lecture 1 Miscellaneous Conference announcements –Advance copies of papers Manuals — some systems have no general publications Tutorial notes –usually from conferences, or summer schools Articles in encyclopedias, other references –tend to quickly become outdated

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 25 Lecture 1 Miscellaneous Notification services –you subscribe to "key words" and are notified when new works mentioning those keywords are published Videotaped lectures –Some libraries carry them Laboratory annual reports Recent theses –especially related work sections –UMI (formerly University Microfilms, expensive)

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 26 Lecture 1 Overseas Research Can be a real problem — often separate journals and conferences tendency to miss this kind of work Language barrier, most journals are not translated important journals in German, French, Japanese, Russian, Chinese Getting easier with the Web many people post English descriptions of recent work

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 27 Lecture 1 Next Lecture Library Search Skills ?

Scholarship Skills Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 28 Lecture 1 Assignment 1 Jan 10, 2006, due Thursday Jan 12, 2006 Write two paragraphs (~ words) on some technical subject from your field of study. This can be a short overview of a paper, or a description of a common algorithm, a theoretical concept, an implementation method or problem, or an introduction to your own research. The paragraphs should be addressed to a general scientific audience, not to specialists in the subject you are writing on. In two paragraphs, you cannot go into much depth. The goal is to get down a key idea or (at most) two in very clear, simple prose. Give yourself enough time to rewrite the paragraphs at least once, so that you are not handing in a first draft.