How to get the most out of the survey task + suggested survey topics for CS512 Presented by Nikita Spirin

About me PhD student, CS UIUC, Data and Information Science Lab (DAIS) Advisor: Kevin Chang Research Interests: data mining, machine learning, structured search, spam Last year took CS 512 and made a survey, which is now in SIGKDD Exploration Journal!

This talk: Why a survey? How to make a survey? What to survey?

Why do we have a survey task in CS512? Expert knowledge of the state-of-the-art – Don’t reinvent the wheel – Really understand the connections between methods and ideas Build a special angle on a topic and identify prospective research problems Improve your skills on critical thinking skills and analytical work with a lot of scientific literature Help yourself with the project for the class

How to approach the task: 1. Select the right topic Read surveys from KDD Explorations, ACM Surveys to get the idea of material organization. What sections? How long? How to present? Select a few interesting for you topics and: – Search for existing surveys and assess their quality – Estimate the amount of papers published – Is topic trendy, popular, important, impactful? – Pick the one that you will write about!

How to approach the task: 2. Prepare a material and a plan Find top researchers and research groups, conferences, journals, demo systems on selected topic Skim fast highly cited, recent works of prominent researchers to get a good approximation of other good works Write a plan with the answers to questions: – Why your survey will be important? What’s new? What perspective you want to open? – Set deadlines for yourself and follow them – Add key citations at the end of the proposal

How to approach the task: 3. Make a comprehensive list of papers Title Subtopic (will be a section of a paper) Key ideas Conference Quality Year Conference Authors Other

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How to approach the task: 4. Taking notes and JIT writing, iterate While reading papers create a citation graph traversal policy (BFS, DFS) Read a text, update record in your table Write about it in the text, right after your read it Add references to the.bib file Having finished a block of papers, revise the big picture and see how ideas fit together

My timeline was weeks almost full-time during the class 1-2 weeks of part-time editing for the final submission Finished first draft in April Finished survey completely for the end of the class Added new works in summer 2011 Submitted to SIGKDD Explorations in October Accepted in late January

Suggested topics for survey and project S Influencers detection, users profiling (interests, similarity), community modelling, networks clustering, info propagation (can give pointers, etc.) S,P Spam in social networks (can provide solid input of references, etc.) S Knowledge base modelling and construction from unstructured web, query processing and search, scalability, merging knowledge base and info integration (can give pointers, etc.) S,P “Survey assistant” (simplify the work of researchers to work with literature) (can give pointers and come talk to me about project) S – survey, P – project, bold – more appropriate for this type

Thank you and good luck! My contacts: – spirin2 – Skype: spirinus – Office: SC 1127