CMSC 601: Basic Research Skills

Reading(s)/
Assignments Made

M. E. J. Newman, "The structure of scientific collaboration networks" (pdf)
to be discussed in class

Finish Kung.
Introduction to LaTeX.

• LaTeX sample input file and pdf output file
  
• LaTeX tutorial input file and pdf output file
• Video introduction to LaTeX (html)
  
• Starting out with Tex, LaTeX and friends: http://www.ctan.org/starter/?action=/index.html%20
  
• "Short" Latex Introduction (153 pages) OnLine Latex Tutorial from TUG: http://www.tug.org/tutorials/tugindia/
  

• Assignment due Monday, 2/8/10: prepare a simple resume for yourself using LaTeX. Please submit your original .tex file, and the corresponding pdf file, by email.
• Alan Jay Smith, The Task of the Referee
  originally from IEEE Computer, April 1990 (pdf).
• Ian Parberry, A Guide for New Referees in Theoretical Computer Science
• Palsberg and Baxter, Teaching Reviewing to Graduate Students

Paper summary guidelines
Example: Summary of Newman paper
Paraphrasing guidelines

ICML-03 reviewing form

2/10

2/15

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/europe/12germany.html

The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies
Justin Zobel's writing page
Bob Grant, "Right your Writing"(html)
Gopen and Swan, "The Science of Scientific Writing" (pdf)

Annotated bibliography guidelines(ps, pdf) LaTeX source, and BibTeX file
Oren Patashnik, "BibTeXing"
Plain (sorted) and unsorted annotated bibliography BibTeX style files 
Levin and Rendell, How to Write a Good Systems Paper Local copies(ps,pdf)

2/17 

Writing I: Organization, bibliographies.  BibTeX.
In-depth survey analysis and critique.

Chinneck, How to Organize Your Thesis
Google Scholar
Sample topics
Topic guidelines
Literature survey tips
Editing symbols

Writing II: Style, common errors.

Slides

example: searching the Patent Database

How to give a good presentation.

Generic dissertation outline.

Outline of a (draft) thesis proposal

• introduction - topic paragraph
• survey of literature - what are the seminal papers?
• summary, summary, summary
• more recent work - papers which cite seminal papers
• Foobar et al. used a small data set, but we want to try on 100TB web corpus
• Dewey, Cheatham and Howe advocated use of FASB 33, but we want to use FASB 444
• how would we do this, if we had the resources?
• what evidence is available to substantiate your claim(s)?

More on research topics

Writing III: Tools.

More on public speaking

Literature survey review form

We looked at "Life After Death by Powerpoint" by Don McMillan, available at Youtube
desJardins, How to Succeed in Graduate School (ps ,pdf )

Applying to Ph.D. Programs in Computer Science by Mor Harchol-Balter


Outside reader agreement

Update: What do I mean by detailed outline? As described above on March 3, the document is to have the following structure. For much of this, you'll have a good deal written, but other parts may be no more than bullet points or sentence fragements. But it should look something like this, expanded to maybe 3-5 pages. The final paper will be more like 15 pages. Real proposals are sometimes twice that or more.

• Problem Statement - you've already written most of this
• Survey of Related work - from the 10+ papers you've read
• What could still be done? What would be new? What's your secret weapon?
• Why is your idea plausible? What evidence do you have, or could hope to get? You can describe evidence that you don't yet have or even know you can get
• What would need to be done to get from here to there?
  

Introduction to statistics for CS - normal distribution, t-test, chi-square, at a high level! Resources include stattrek
But there are many other tutorials and examples on the web.

t test spreadsheet

You may want to become familiar with the R Project, which is a highly regarded, free, extensible stats package.

Using R to fit a curve to a scatterplot

multinomial spreadsheet

Career Development - Time Management

Randy Pausch's talk (pdf) The video is available at many sites, including http://video.google.com the 2007 version.

Research portfolio guidelines

Retirement Advice

Retirement spreadsheet (xls)

Advice to a Young Scientist, Dijksta (pdf)
Professional societies: ACM, IEEE, Usenix, CRA, AAAS, AAAI,
NSBE, Systers

Science's Next Wave

Getting Grants

white papers, brainstorming, talking to program managers, review panels, earmarks

the role of funding in academic rank

More on personal finance from Get Rich Slowly

Mind mapping, and software to help do it

Web sites for NSF, DARPA, NIH, MIPS, ONR, AFOSR, IARPA

• Poster
  visual appeal
  legible from where you're seated
  appropriate use of fonts
  appropriate use of colors
  right mix of text and graphics
  grammar and spelling
• Technical
  at the right level of detail
  right level of formality
  understandable?
  if not, why not?
  central idea - was it presented?
  appropriate presentation of related work?
  evaluation?
  future work?
• Presentation skills
  eye contact
  talking too quickly?
  appropriate use of humor
  talking loud enough
• Suggestions for speaker:

Some examples of posters:
McNamee, Nicholas and Mayfield (pdf)
Wilson and Nicholas (pdf)
Finin et al (pdf)
Martineau et al (pdf)

Student project presentations
Graphics .

Kavita has a demo

Last day of class: May 13