How to get the most out of the survey task + suggested survey topics for CS512

1. How to get the most out of the survey task+suggested survey topics for CS512 Presented by Nikita Spirin

2. About me • PhD student, CS UIUC, Data and Information Science Lab (DAIS) • Advisor: Kevin Chang • Research Interests: data mining, machine learning, structured search, spam • Last year took CS 512 and made a survey, which is now in SIGKDD Exploration Journal!

3. This talk: Why asurvey? How to make asurvey? What to survey?

4. Why do we have a survey task in CS512? • Expert knowledge of the state-of-the-art • Don’t reinvent the wheel • Really understand the connections between methods and ideas • Build a special angle on a topic and identify prospective research problems • Improve your skills on critical thinking skills and analytical work with a lot of scientific literature • Help yourself with the project for the class

5. How to approach the task:1. Select the right topic • Read 10-20 surveys from KDD Explorations, ACM Surveys to get the idea of material organization. What sections? How long? How to present? • Select a few interesting for you topics and: • Search for existing surveys and assess their quality • Estimate the amount of papers published • Is topic trendy, popular, important, impactful? • Pick the one that you will write about!

6. How to approach the task: 2. Prepare a material and a plan • Find top researchers and research groups, conferences, journals, demo systems on selected topic • Skim fast highly cited, recent works of prominent researchers to get a good approximation of other good works • Write a plan with the answers to questions: • Why your survey will be important? What’s new? What perspective you want to open? • Set deadlines for yourself and follow them • Add key citations at the end of the proposal

7. How to approach the task: 3. Make a comprehensive list of papers • Title • Subtopic (will be a section of a paper) • Key ideas • Conference • Quality • Year • Conference • Authors • Other

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9. How to approach the task: 4. Taking notes and JIT writing, iterate • While reading papers create a citation graph traversal policy (BFS, DFS) • Read a text, update record in your table • Write about it in the text, right after your read it • Add references to the .bib file • Having finished a block of papers, revise the big picture and see how ideas fit together

10. My timeline was.. • 3-5 weeks almost full-time during the class • 1-2 weeks of part-time editing for the final submission • Finished first draft in April • Finished survey completely for the end of the class • Added new works in summer 2011 • Submitted to SIGKDD Explorations in October • Accepted in late January

11. Suggested topics for survey and project • S Influencers detection, users profiling (interests, similarity), community modelling, networks clustering, info propagation (can give pointers, etc.) • S,P Spam in social networks (can provide solid input of references, etc.) • S Knowledge base modelling and construction from unstructured web, query processing and search, scalability, merging knowledge base and info integration (can give pointers, etc.) • S,P “Survey assistant” (simplify the work of researchers to work with literature) (can give pointers and come talk to me about project) S – survey, P – project, bold – more appropriate for this type

12. Thank you and good luck! My contacts: • E-mail: spirin2 • Skype: spirinus • Office: SC 1127