scholarship skills tim sheard and todd leen 1 lecture 1 scholarship skills tim sheard and todd leen...

Scholarship Skills

Tim Sheard and Todd Leen 1Lecture 1

Scholarship Skills

Tim Sheard and Todd Leen2006 PSU - OHSU

All material © 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000

David Maier

Lecture 1: Course Overview, Background Research

Scholarship Skills


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


Course Mechanics

InstructorsTim Sheard

[email protected]

Todd [email protected], BCB 150E

503-748-1160, 503-748-1548 (FAX)

Time: Winter Quarter 2006. – Tuesday / Thursday 2:00 – 3:20 pm. – Classroom –OND 220– Class Web pagehttp://www.cs.pdx.edu/~sheard/course/SkolSkillsW06/index.html

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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• 10-15 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

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Grading

• Tentative Grading Scheme• Exercises 10%• Projects 90%

• Bibliography 15%• 2-page summary 15%• Revision of 2-page summary 10%• 5-min. Presentation 10%• 10-15 page Paper 25%• 15-min. Presentation 15%

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Texts

Required Texts: – Lyn Dupre’. Bugs in Writing: A Guide to

Debugging Your Prose (2nd edition). Addison-Wesley, 1998. ISBN 020137921X

Other Useful Books – see syllabus– Mark Zobel. Writing for Computer

Science. Springer 1997. ISBN 9813083220

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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


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.

http://www.ogi.edu/graduate_edu/policies/integrity/index.cfm

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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

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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

•10-15 page Paper– A background paper on a technical topic

of 10-15 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

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Purpose of Course

Make you better scholars• better researchers•better writers•better presenters• better reviewers

Especially writing, and oral presentation

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Learn to communicateWritten papers and articles

How to readHow to writeHow to judge the writing of others

Oral PresentationsHow to organize an oral presentationHow to present an oral presentationHow to listen to an oral presentation

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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?

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• 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

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• 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

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Background Research

Finding relevant materialNo single source that you can rely

onYou have to use a combination of

approachesNot everything is on the web

not everything on the web is valuable – no quality control!

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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)

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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 forwardCiteSeer http://citeseer.nj.nec.com is

useful for chaining forward. (Also Science Citation Index.)

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Indexing and Abstract Services

• Current Contents– Table of Contents are now often on-line

• ACM Guide to Computing Literature– Annual volumes

• On-line indexing servicessearchable via author, title, keywordssometimes include complete abstracts

• Citation Indexes– i.e. "Science Citation Index“, Citeseer

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/– limited to what they index

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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

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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

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The Internet

• Newsgroups – DB/LP (database and logic programming)– comp.lang.functional

(compilers/languages/functional)

• Web pagesResearch groupsGeneral sources — on-line bibliographies

• Directories and search enginesNational tech report library (NCSTRL)http://www.ncstrl.org/

Computing Resource Repository (CoRR)http://www.acm.org/corr/

• Mailing lists – more relevant than newsgroups usually

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The Internet

• SolicitationOn newsgroupsIn mailing lists

Make sure that your questions are appropriate

Email — give addresses for email 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

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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

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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)

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Overseas Research

Can be a real problem — often separate journals and conferencestendency to miss this kind of work

Language barrier, most journals are not translatedimportant journals in German, French,

Japanese, Russian, Chinese

Getting easier with the Webmany people post English descriptions of

recent work

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Next Lecture

Library Search Skills ?

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Assignment 1

Jan 10, 2006, due Thursday Jan 12, 2006

Write two paragraphs (~150-250 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.

scholarship skills tim sheard and todd leen 1 lecture 1 scholarship skills tim sheard and todd leen...

Documents

scholarship skills tim

page paper

david maier lecture

projects projects

page summary

background research

basis projects

research paper revision