The purpose of the assignment is to demonstrate competency in scientific writing by studying a topic, writing a short paper on that topic, including the author's own contribution, giving a presentation on the paper, and participating in the paper review process.

Writing the Paper

The paper is to be written using the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science format. Templates and instructions are provided on the Springer Web site. These instructions are to be followed exactly. The correct Latex style is llnc.cls, in the llncs.zip file. An example document is in the typeinst.{pdf,zip} files. MS Word templates are in word.zip.

The maximum length of the paper is 10 pages, and this will be enforced strictly. At a minimum, the paper should be 8 pages long. In word count, these requirements translate to approximately 3500-4000 words, but word count will not be measured.

The paper must contain a sufficient number of references. Information crucial to the paper's topic must be acquired from more than one reference, and auxiliary references are required for minor points. A summary or survey of existing work is not sufficient: the paper must contain the student's own contribution, such as an evaluation of a proposed system or reasoned discussion of a technology's future prospects. The level of the contribution does not need to be at the level of scientific publication, but must demonstrate an understanding of the topic and the capability of producing new information.

Presentation

Presentation dates will be assigned at the same time as paper topics. Each student has 20 minutes presentation time, of which at least 5 minutes must be reserved for questions and discussion. The limit on speaking time will be enforced.

Submission and Review

A draft version of the paper is to be submitted a week before the presentation. These draft versions will be made available on the course Web site. The draft needs to be sufficiently complete in that the student should be comfortable with submitting the draft as a final version, but length limits are not enforced strictly on the draft.

Each student is assigned two other papers to review. The reviews are performed on the draft versions and submitted to both the other student and the course instructor. The reviewer is expected to be very familiar with the reviewed paper and thus participate actively in that paper's presentation. The presentation itself need not be reviewed by students.

The review comments are to be considered and based on them a final version of the paper is prepared and submitted to the instructor one week after the presentation.

Review Instructions

In this course, the point of the review is to give objective critique of the paper and provide helpful comments that will allow the author to improve the paper, both in terms of subject matter and presentation. The review should be between 500 and 1000 words (good papers require less advice), and include the following sections:

Paper summary: Short (a few sentences) summary of the paper in your own words, i.e., do not copy the abstract.
Review Comments: Objective, accurate, polite, and helpful comments on parts of the paper that need improvement. Some topics to cover are: logical structure, are concepts introduced in the right order?, is there any unnecessary material?, do sentences tie into each other, or are they disconnected?, are bullets used as a substitute for prose?, is there unnecessarily complicated formulations or terms?, is the language grammatically correct?, are citations properly used?, do figures and tables relate to the text?, are the figures and tables clear? Also, in case of text quoted directly from other sources (which should be used sparingly), is proper attribution to the original source given?
In case there are too many issues to fit into the review 1000 word limit, you should focus on more high-level comments, i.e., include comments on structure and subject matter rather than minor issues like typos, bad grammar, etc.
Improvement Example: Chose one or a few paragraphs, or a short section (5-10 lines) from the paper that you think could be improved, and then rewrite it, according to your notion of how to improve it. Alternatively, if there are no major improvements to be found, chose a particularly well written piece of text (5-10 lines), and write a few sentences on why you think it is good writing. Remember to mention what part of the text you have chosen, so that the author may benefit from your advice!
Rating of Technical Depth and Accuracy: Rate the paper on how well it presents technical issues at the correct detail (not too shallow, not too detailed), and how accurate it is. Scale is 1=bad, 2=weak, 3=meets expectations, 4=good, 5=excellent
Rating of Presentation: Rate the clarity of the paper and how well the topic is presented. I.e., is the structure good, does it stay on topic, are figures and tables clear, and do they tie into the text. Scale as above
Overall Rating: Your overall impression of the paper. Scale as above.

Each review will be evaluated based on how well it identifies relevant issues in the paper, on how accurate it is, and how helpful it is to the author.

Submission Instructions

You will use a tool called Optima to submit your work. The tool is available here. You log in with your Unix account and the service password. Once logged in you should see a T-110.7100 workspace. Please let me know if this is not the case. General Optima help can be found here.

Upload the assignments in the folder that has your name. In particular, when reviewing a paper, you should upload the review to your own folder, not the folder where the reviewed paper is.

The file name of the draft version of your paper should be something-draft.pdf and the final version something-final.pdf. For instance, if I wrote a paper on Gnus, my draft and final versions could be named gnus-draft.pdf and gnus-final.pdf. Note that need to use either PDF or TXT formats to make the life of your coursemates easier. You cannot assume everyone has access to Word.

Points to note

Here are some points to note:

Keep the deadlines. Draft version is 7 days prior to presentation, final is 7 days after presentation. Review deadline is the day the reviewed paper is presented.
Use the Springer template as advised above
The draft version should be good enough to submit as final. Check your language and fix spelling errors!
Use proper scientific sources. Any random web page is not a credible source; it is more likely a blatant lie :) Do not use Wikipedia as a primary reference (but the references at the bottom of Wikipedia articles are sometimes very useful!)
Do not email me drafts/reviews. Put them in Optima
Do not "write" by copying and pasting text. Do not include verbatim text from elsewhere, and if you really must, still do not do it unless you are sure about how to properly give attribution to the source.
In the presentation, you can be light on the basics, as the audience will know what P2P, SIP, etc is.