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Course Description*

Abstract

The following document describes the main aims and goals of the course (Proseminar). In addition, we give details on the main methods and expectations on how to accomplish the coarse goals and tasks. 

1 Introduction

During the studies of computer science (“Informatik”) or related subjects, students often have to write articles or papers on a specific topic. Such papers can be seminar papers (“Semiararbeit”, “Proseminararbeit” etc.) or much longer papers such as a master thesis (“Diplomarbeit”) or even a Ph.D. thesis (“Doktorarbeit”). An important aspect is to clearly present the ideas and follow some general ways of scientific writing. 
 
Usually, all scientific papers have the following points in common: 
 
For further details on how to write a scientific paper refer to the Appendix. 
 
The main goal of this course is to write a scientific article that meets the general standards of the computer science community. Students are expected to first read background literature on how to write such articles. Next, the acquired knowledge is applied to a specific topic and students will write a short article on their own. An important part is that students work in teams and compose one article per team. Once the article has been written, it will be presented at the end of the term. Emphasis is put on clearly presenting the work. 

2 Computer Science Workshops and Conferences

As pointed out in the introduction, computer science articles or papers usually follow a general standard. Given the “audience” and the expectations of an article, the article length (page limitation) varies. Whereas seminar papers are usually about 20 to 30 pages, a master or Ph.D. thesis has typically around 100 pages. Here, we do not aim to write long articles but mainly focus on the correct methods. Therefore, we limit the page number to 8 pages and use a common style sheet (i.e. a common font, paper size etc.) as indicated below. 
 
A major aim of this course is also to learn how computer scientists publish their work. For instance, assume that Dijkstra has just created a novel search algorithm or Linus Torvalds has created a novel operating system feature. Both computer scientists have the aim to publish their ideas to the computer science community. Rather than writing a full book (which requires an expensive and long publishing procedure), both want to quickly convey their ideas in a concise and clear way and present their work. In order to so, there are international conferences or workshops on certain domains such as data structures or operating systems where authors are invited to submit 8 to 15 page (depending on the conference) articles about new research goals. Typically, each conference has a committee that reviews submitted articles and then selects a number of them that are presented at the conference. In addition to presenting the paper orally, the article is published by a special publisher (e.g. IEEE, ACM, Springer Verlag, etc.) in a “book” called “proceedings”. 
 
The aim of this course is to follow such an approach and prepare an article for publication to a conference. We do not really submit the final article but exercise all the necessary steps from writing the article, following certain methods, submitting it to the lecturers on time, reviewing it and finally presenting it at the end of the term. 
 
For further information on international computer science conferences, have a look at the IEEE web site (http://www.ieee.org) and select “Conferences”/”Find a Conference”. Please also search the Internet for the keyword “International Conference” and select some computer science conferences. Typically, you can find conferences on all major computing aspects: databases, Internet, distributed computing, graphics, operation systems, Grid computing, hardware, etc. 

3 Some General Questions and Answers

In the following section we present a set of questions and answers that help you understand the aims of the course as well as how they can be reached. 
 
 
3.1 Why do we write the article in English? 
 
In computer science, many books as well as software is written in English. In addition, the international computer science language is de facto English. For example, usually all international conferences are held in English. In this way we prepare the students for the international “market”. 
 
3.2 Will I ever write an article for a conference? 
 
Almost every master and Ph.D. student is expected to publish the results of her/his thesis. A computer science conference is a very good forum to publish ideas and results. In particular, if you plan a scientific career at the university, such a publication procedure is part of the daily work. 
 
3.3 What is the relevance for my studies? 
 
Even if you do not plan to write a master nor a Ph.D. thesis, the general scientific methods that you need to apply in this course are relevant for most kinds of technical articles that you will have to write during your studies. Furthermore, you will learn how to clearly and concisely express your ideas, which is of general usage in every day life in industry and research. 
 
3.4 Why do we have to write the article in a team? 
 
In the computing field, you usually never work alone. This is true 
 
· if you work as a software engineer in industry, 
 
· if you are the project manager of an IT project, 
 
· if you are the main software architect of a software company, 
 
· if you work as a computer scientist in an international project 
 
· etc. 
 
You usually always have to deal with people in order to agree on a technical solution, solve a problem etc. Often, people do not even work in the same office or city. We therefore want you to learn to work in a team and organise yourselves to accomplish a common task. 
 
3.5 Why do we mainly communicate via e-mail? 
 
National or international companies as well as academic organisations often have distributed locations and therefore people do not always have a common, physical meeting place. One aim of this course is to learn to work and communicate via e-mail. 
 
3.6 What style sheet do I have to take to write the article? 
 
We assume that we are preparing a conference paper that will be published in the proceedings of an IEEE conference. We therefore use a certain style sheet and follow the IEEE Author Guidelines as indicated at: 
 
      http://www.computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm
 
Each paper has to have a maximum of 8 pages (two columns per page, 10 point font size) and should follow the author instructions given above. Please follow all the author instructions above. A typical example of such a paper can be found at: 
 
http://sdm.lbl.gov/~kurts/research/grid-edu-2004-tutorial.ps 
 
3.7 What text editing software do we have to use? 
 
In the computer science community, LaTeX is the one of the most used editing and publishing software tools. We encourage students to use LaTeX. Please use the IEEE style sheet template as indicated: 
 
ftp://pubftp.computer.org/press/outgoing/proceedings/IEEE_CS_Latex.zip 
 
If you are not yet familiar with LaTeX, take some time to learn it since you can use it later for all technical documents in your studies. The LaTeX syntax is a bit similar to HTML. For a tutorial on LaTeX see the following web site: http://www.tug.org.in/tutorials.html. 

4 Required Tasks

The following section presents all the tasks that are required to successfully pass the course. The main tasks are as follows: 
 
1. Create a small team of 2 or 3 students: Please contact the lecturer to confirm your participation to the group and the course: 
 
irfan.ulhaq@univie.ac.at 
 
2. Select a certain topic for an article: in order to help you find a topic, we have selected a main field in computer science (Grid computing, a special sub domain in distributed computing). You are supposed to find your own topic in Grid computing. In order to give you some hints, see the Appendix for details. 
 
In case you prefer to select another topic of interest, feel free to do so but provide the source (book articles etc.) to the lectures in electronic form. The source needs to be in English. 
 
3. Write a first version of the article and submit it to the lecturers by the date indicted as “First submission” in the timetable below. Please submit via e-mail to the lecturer: 
 
irfan.ulhaq@univie.ac.at 
 
You are expected to follow also the style guidelines as indicated in Sections 3.6 and 3.7. Once you have submitted the article, the lecturer will give you feedback on how to improve it. The first submission does not contain a related work section. 
 
4. Add a section on Related Work to the article. In order to do so, first identify some main computer science conferences in Grid computing and find at least 3 relevant articles that match your topic. Discuss the related work and compare it with the ideas in your article. Each of the related articles needs to be referenced in your paper. The related work section should be about ½ page. 
 
Submit a final version of the paper including also the feedback you have received on the first version you submitted. The final paper is then the so-called “camera ready version” that would be ready to be published in a conference. 
 
5. Final presentation of the article: each group has to present the article using standard, modern presentation techniques. Each group member must be present at the final presentation at the university. 
 
 
The final mark of the course consists of a about 70% of the article and 30% of the final presentation. However, the course can only be marked positively if a student attends the final presentation. 
 
Note: Although there are no 100% objective points to mark an article, we expect you to read several related articles (related work section) to get an idea on how computer science articles are written. Therefore, we except students work in groups and discuss such points among them. Questions to the lecturers are always welcome. 

5 Conclusion

We wish you good luck for preparing the article. In case of questions, please feel free to contact the lecturers per e-mail. The lecturers will also try to provide answers to the entire class (all registered students of the course). 

6 Appendix

6.1 Possible topics

6.2 Some background references:

* Many Many Thanks to Heinz Stockinger
Letzte Änderung: 01.04.2008, 21:43 | 2105 Worte