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How to Search, Read, Write, and Present a Paper. How to search papers. Google.com Major conferences In the areas of wireless communications/mobile computing: IEEE INFOCOM: http://www.ieee-infocom.org/ ACM SIGCOMM: http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigcomm/
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How to search papers • Google.com • Major conferences • In the areas of wireless communications/mobile computing: • IEEE INFOCOM: http://www.ieee-infocom.org/ • ACM SIGCOMM: http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigcomm/ • ACM MOBICOM: http://www.sigmobile.org/mobicom/ • ACM MobiHoc: http://www.sigmobile.org/mobihoc/ • ACM SenSys: http://www.sigmobile.org/sensys/ • ACM MobiSys: http://www.sigmobile.org/mobisys/ • In the areas of security: • IEEE Synposium on Security & Privacy: http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP-Index.html • ACM CCS: http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigsac/ccs/ • NDSS: http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/ndss/ • Usenix Security: http://www.usenix.org/events/bytopic/security.html • International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID): http://www.raid-symposium.org/ • CRYPTO: http://www.iacr.org/conferences/crypto2005/ • … • Just because a conference is “IEEE” or “ACM” or “International” does not mean it is very good • Only a few conferences in any area are worth publishing in
How to Search Papers • Major Journals: Journals are a few years behind, but more comprehensive and can still be useful • Technical reports from active research group • Survey/Overview papers: • ACM Computing surveys, CACM, IEEE Computer..
Why Read/Not Read Papers • Why read? • Find interesting topics • Know the current status in one area • Why not read? • Cannot and should not read everything • Can suppress innovation • once you see solutions using a particular theme, often hard to think differently
How to Read Papers • Abstract • Introduction • Motivation • Problem Description • Solution • … • Performance analysis • Conclusion • Future Work
When you read papers • What problems are the authors trying to solve? Are they important problems? Why or why not? • What new architecture, algorithm, mechanism, methodology, or perspective are the authors proposing? (How is the new idea different from all other ideas?) • What are the usefulness and practicality of the idea? • Be skeptical • If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? - Albert Einstein
When you read papers • What to evaluate? • What need to be evaluated to confirm the worthiness of the new idea? For example, runtime, throughput, cache miss ratio, utilization, etc.? • How to evaluate? • conduct the evaluation? • prove theorems or not? • run simulations ? • build a system ? • collect traces from existing systems ?
When you read papers • Was the Evaluation Correct and Adequate? • How was their data collection done? • Do you agree with their analysis of the data? • Do you agree with their conclusions about the data? • Do you have new interpretation of their data? • Can you suggest new ways to evaluate their idea?
When you read papers • Assumptions, Drawbacks, Extensions: • Can you think of other aspects of their idea that need to be evaluated? • Can you think of extensions or modifications to their idea to improve it? • How would you evaluate your improvement? • Can you apply their idea or method of evaluation to your own project? • Do the authors make any assumptions that are not valid/realistic? • Can you come up with a more general solution that does not rely on one or more of the assumptions the authors make?
When you write papers • Most papers are not that exceptional • Good writing makes significant difference • Better to say little clearly, than saying too much unclearly
How to write a systems paper • Provide sufficient information to allow people to reproduce your results • People may want to reproduce exciting results • Reviewers expect this information • Do not provide wrong information • Sometimes hard to provide all details in available space • May be forced to omit some information • Judge what is the most essential to the experiments • Cite a tech report for more information
How to write a theory paper • Readers should be able to understand contributions without reading all details • If some proof are not too important, relegate them to an appendix • Make it formal
Discuss Related Work • Explain how your work relates to state of the art • Discuss relevant past work by other people too • Do not offend people • Avoid: The scheme presented by XXX performs terribly • Prefer: The scheme presented by XXX does not perform as well in scenario X as it does in scenario Y • If your ideas do not work well in some interesting scenarios, tell the reader
Reference • The format of the reference • Example: • J. Broch, D. A. Maltz, D. B. Johnson, Y.-C. Hu, and J. Jetcheva, “A performance comparison of multi-hop wireless ad hoc network routing protocols,” in Proc. 4th Annu. ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom’98), Dallas, TX, 1998, pp. 85–97. • S. E. Deering, D. Estrin, D. Farinacci, V. Jacobson, C. Liu, and L. Wei, “The PIM architecture for wide-area multicast routing,” IEEE Trans. Networking, vol. 4, pp. 153–162, Apr. 1996. • Y. Yu, R. Govindan, and D. Estrin, “Geographical and energy aware routing: A recursive data dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks,” Univ. California, Los Angeles, Tech. Rep. UCLA/CSD-TR-01-0023, 2001.
How to present a paper • Motivation and Problem Statement • Why should anyone care? • Remember: people in audience may not be working on your problem • Related Work • Your Methods • Results • Summary • Conclusion and Future Work • Backup Slides • Optionally have a few slides ready (not counted in your talk total) to answer expected questions.
How to present a paper • Use Powerpoint • Pay attention to the color and font size • Use illustrations/pictures to explain complex algorithms • Use examples