COMP 911 - Fall ‘07: Survey Presentation

Date Assigned: Tue Sep 18, 2007

Completion Date: Tue Oct 2, 2007

In this presentation you will summarize 3 or more papers in any research area. Your summary should integrate the papers by forming links between them.  You will be judged on the level of integration you do, which in turn is a function of the papers you survey. There are at least two kinds of integration possible:

1.      Providing a single abstract description of multiple concrete features in different papers. For example abstracting different synchronization policies into a dimensionalized design space and comparing different points in the space using the evaluation metrics of concurrency and consistency degrees.

2.      Showing that some feature in a paper helps overcomes or creates some problem with a feature in another paper. For showing that synchronization must be taken into account by multi-processor scheduling.

Therefore, try and pick papers in which one of these two integrations (or some other integration) is possible. You should provide new ways of comparing the papers rather than the ones already used in the papers themselves or a survey written by someone else. If you pick three related papers presented in the same conference session, then you are guaranteed to provide a fresh way of integrating them.

Ideally, there should be no seams among the papers you survey. You should begin with some set of problems, raise issues, and present and evaluate approaches to addressing these issues. The problems, issues, and approaches would come from the papers, though it is not necessary to explicitly identify them. Also, ideally, new research directions should emerge from your discussion.

If you find this hard to do, you can talk about each paper in sequence, but do connect them together in some way by comparing them. The comparisons can be made while you present each paper, after you have discussed all papers, or even before you present the papers in some design space you identify at the start.

The presentation should be 45 minutes long. Thus, this assignment will give you practice in giving a colloquium/thesis-length talk. In the next assignment, you will convert your talk to a 5000 word paper.

At least an hour before class on Oct 2, copy the presentation file to the directory: \\dewan-cs\deposit\911, if you have network access to departmental Windows machines ; and /afs/cs.unc.edu/home/dewan/deposit, if you have access to departmental AFS.   If you don’t have access to either afs or windows, mail me the file. Also, if you have managed to get the LiveMeeting link working, upload the file also to the LiveMeeting session by executing the ShareàDocument To View command.