The Working Paper as a Microcosm of Research Thought, Planning, and Execution

1. The Working Paper as a Microcosm★ of Research Thought, Planning, and Execution Prabal Dutta University of Michigan EECS 582 March 12, 2013 ★A miniature model of something

2. The working paper model of research • Basic tenet: write the paper as you do the research • The working paper becomes • Sketchpad for early ideas (sometimes literally) • Especially for titles, abstracts, intros, and conclusions • Framework for structuring your thought (detailed outline) • Roadmap for research (“just” have to flesh out framework) • Notebook for capturing data • Medium for dialogue with others • Technical report (with an abundance of details) • Paper (submission) for communicating your ideas • If people don’t know about your idea, then why bother? • Facilitates timely knowledge creation and dissemination • A lot easier than writing the paper at the end!

3. Writing informs research; Research informs writing • Write the paper to crystallize and develop the idea • Do the research to validate the ideas you wrote about

4. Start with a project “codename” • Pick something short, insightful, memorable, unique • iCount • Current meter that works by counting regulator cycles • HiJack • Plugs into audio jack from which it steals power and data • PowerSockit (yes, it’s misspelled on purpose) • Power meter in socket form for “socking it [power]” • Initially, codename serves as the project “handle” • Could evolve to become the project name/title as well • Probably best to avoid naming all code with it though!

5. Choose a title at the beginning • Have an idea? Brainstorm possible titles: • “Energy Metering for Free…” • “Meter Any Wire, Anywhere…” • “Hijacking Power and Bandwidth…” • “Shrinking and Greening the AC Power Meter” • Forces you to • Think very early on about what you’re doing – and why • Concisely articulate the core idea (sometimes difficult) • Make clear and concrete what may now be cloudy and vague • Not permanent though…

6. Try to write the abstract next (it will change later) • The “Four-Sentence Abstract” by Kent Beck • State the problem • Describe why the problem is important and interesting • Describe what your solution achieves • Present the implications of the work • An example abstract by Simon Peyton Jones • Many papers are badly written and hard to understand. • This is a pity, because their good ideas may go unappreciated. • Following simple guidelines can dramatically improve the quality of your papers. • Your work will be used more, and the feedback you get from others will in turn improve your research.

7. Telling the story through figures, tables, and great captions • Challenge • Communicate your ideas clearly, concisely • Only require reader to read title, abstract, headings, figures, tables, and captions to understand and accept paper’s claims • Figures • Visual presentation of ideas and results • Drawings of architecture, system design • Figures must serve a [stated] purpose • Illustrate trends in a variable • Illustrate relationship between variables • Tables • Synthesize existing literature • Present experimentally-collected data • Use to communicate raw data, not relationships

8. Great figures and captions • Figure • Avoid titles • Axes must be labeled and readable • Axes must be scaled properly (linear, log, etc). • Axes should start at zero (unless there’s a good reason) • Units must be clear • Lines must be clear and distinguishable on B&W print • Captions • First sentence: essentially a figure “title” • Second sentence: explanation of figure • Third sentence: implications of figure

9. A rough outline to collect your thoughts • Abstract • Introduction • Related Work • Overview • Design  Focus on this area • Implementation • Evaluation  Focus on this area • Discussion • Conclusion

10. The design section answers why of what you did • Focus on the essential design problems • Ignore incidental aspects • Avoid the “what I did on my summer vacation diary” • Focus on the why rather than the what • The implementation will describe the what • Develop conceptual models • The evaluation will validate these • They serve as an important contribution

11. The evaluation answers the important questions • Identify the set of experiments needed to answer the basic set of questions: • Does it work? How do you know? • Does it really work? Did you cover the corner cases? • Does it really, really work? Did you pick adversarial test conditions? • When does it fail? Did you really identify the limits? • Far better an approximate answer to the right question than a precise answer to the wrong one! • What’s the background assumptions of the world?

12. Evolve title and abstract over time • Your understanding evolves with time and experience • So evolve the title and abstract to match! Keep brainstorming… • Ideally, a title should • Be succinct, unique, and descriptive • Convey the key insight, claim, or purpose of the work • Hook the casual reader to want to dig a little deeper • Use unusual but descriptive words that capture idea’s essence • “Hijack”, “Versatile”, “Procrastination”, “Low-Calorie”, “Disentangling”, “Oxymoron”, “For Free”, “Ephemeral”

13. Homework (due Fri, 3/15 at 2:30pm) • Select a project/problem • How? • Describe the background • Things we should know to understand proposal • Develop a testable hypothesis • Relates independent and dependent variables • State the research methodology • How will the idea be tested? • Brainstorm title • Write five possible paper titles to describe your project • Get feedback from others about your titles, noting who • Enumerate what people liked and did not like about them

14. Homework (due Fri, 3/15 at 2:30pm) • Abstract • Write a one paragraph abstract of your work • Must state a hypothesis or make a claim (implicit is not OK) • OK to have placeholders in your claim • e.g. we achieve a factor X improvement • X will be determined by the research • Improvement is your hypothesis • Sketch a paper outline • Do all this in LaTeX, and check into class repo

15. Breaking the loop