COMP 790-063/911 (3 Credits)

Crafting a Research Paper/Talk

Prasun Dewan

Fall '07, TR 11:00-12:15, SN 155

Overview

The design of an effective research paper or talk on some artifact (hardware/software/algorithm) is perhaps as difficult as the design of the artifact itself. In the area of software engineering, design principles and patterns capturing arguably good ways to compose objects have been used to structure the software. In this course, we will try to identify and practice analogous principles and patterns for composing research papers and talks. Thus, the emphasis will be on “design in the large” - how to compose the flow of slides and sections - rather than “design in the small” of individual paragraphs and slides. If you wish to gain fluency in writing and speaking, please take an appropriate course in the English/Communication department. The course will assume a certain level of such fluency.

You will analyze and improve talks and papers of others in addition to crafting your own talks and papers from scratch. Very little of the class time will be spent in canned talks given by me – the major portion of it will be devoted to discussing how to write papers, giving talks, and analyzing (live and recorded) talks. You will record your talks using Microsoft’s LiveMeeting software. This course will build on the research seminar I taught in Fall’06 on collaboration systems, an important component of which was to learn how to communicate the subject matter covered in class. There will be no constraint on the research topics covered in this course. In fact, you will be encouraged to write and present the research topic(s) in which you are interested, and different patterns may emerge for different fields such as graphics, systems, and theory. A side effect of the course will be that students will get a broad perspective of the research done in this department.

COMP 790-063 vs. COMP 911

Because writing is one of the components of this course, it will serve as an offering of COMP 911 (previously Comp 291). If you have already taken COMP 911, you can still get credit for this course (by enrolling in COMP 790-063), as it has the additional component of oral presentations.

Assignments and Grades

The first assignment will be to recursively apply the principles articulated in one or more talks about presentations to the talks themselves. Next you will give a short talk on a CS topic in which you are interested. After this, you will analyze, in groups, one or more recorded talks given last fall by students of my collaboration seminar. For each of these talks, you will look at two versions – the initial one the students composed on their own and the final one they created after input from me. In the next phase of the course, you will improve and extend the initial talk you gave based on the principles and patterns that emerge in the previous phase. As in the collaboration course I taught, you can expect to perform least two iterations of this step.  Before you present a talk in class, you will run it by a fellow-student assigned to you. We will then go through a similar process for papers. You will also give talks and write papers on the principles and patterns for composing research papers and talks that are identified in this course. The exact nature of the assignments will be determined during the course of the semester and will depend on how many students enroll. There will be no exams – grades will be based completely on the assignments and class participation.

Target Student

The course should be of particular value to:

 

1. First year graduate students as the survey will help you explore your area of interest in depth early in your studies.

 

2. Second year student as the course should prepare you for the new Ph.D. qualifying exam, which requires a written report and a presentation. The course was motivated mainly by this requirement. The idea is to  (a) give students concrete specific in-depth guidelines on what makes an effective talk and paper and (b) and to reduce the burden on the advisor of helping with the paper/talk (and increase its quality).

 

3. Students about to start on writing of the thesis and preparation of the job talk. Writing the thesis will probably be the hardest research activity you will undertake. Moreover, there is nothing more important for your future career than preparing your job talk. Again, the course should reduce the burden on the advisor and help reduce the number of iterations of the thesis and talk (and improve their quality).

Relationship with Departmental Requirements

The paper you write can be the basis for meeting the survey-paper requirement, which all graduate students must fulfill.

Text

As no one seems to have tried to identify design patterns for talks and presentations, there is no required text for this class. One interesting book covering both writing and presentation is: Technical Communication: Author: Lannon, John; ISBN10: 0321270762, ISBN13: 9780321270764, Edition: 10TH 06, Publisher: Longman, Inc. For more information on this topic trying searching the internet for the following keyword sequences: presenting paper, writing paper, presentation.

Course URL:

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~dewan/290/f07/