Fall 2009

CSC 3990 - Computing Research Topics

MW 1:30 pm - 2:45 pm in Mendel G88

Instructor:	Dr. Tom Way
Office:	160A Mendel Hall
Phone:	(610) 519-5033
Office hours:	M 12:00 - 1:00 pm
Office hours:	W 3:00 - 6:00 pm
Email:	thomas.way@villanova.edu
Class email:	Fall09-CSC-3990-001@villanova.edu
Gradebook:	Login to WebCT

Announcements

Due date for Literature Survey is November 11.
New assignment! Poster or Software Demo. See below.
Check below for upcoming mandatory class meetings.

Assignments

Due Date	What to Turn in	References
Sept. 2	Research Web Site	▪ Samples (fall 2008)(fall 2007)
Sept. 9	Paper Summary	▪ Summary Guidelines ▪ Helpful Feedback
Sept. 14	Topic Selection	▪ Sample ▪ Outline of CS Topics
Sept. 16	Revised Paper Summary
Sept. 23	Broad Bibliography	▪ IEEE Citation Style ▪ Real Bad Examples ▪ Sample
Oct. 2	No assignment due, but you must start on your Annotated Bibliography!
Oct. 9	Annotated Bibliography	▪ How To ▪ Sample 1, Sample 2
Oct. 21, 26 or 28	Research Topic Presentation
Nov. 11	Literature Survey	▪ Example ▪ Sample (no abstract at this point)
Dec. 4	Poster Presentation or Software Demonstration, for informal lunchtime research symposium in conjunction with Senior Projects posters.
Dec. 9	Finished Paper, including revision to your literature survey, with Conclusions section, and a Proposal or Experimental Results section	▪ Specifications ▪ Examples of Successful Proposals ▪ Examples of Experimental Results
Dec. 11	Attendance at Reading Day research symposium in Software Engineering Lab

Course Schedule

Date	Topic, Activities	References & Description
Week 1 - Aug. 24, 26	Overview Research Topics Syllabus (pdf)	▪ NLP & Image Processing topics (ppt) ▪ ACT Lab ▪ CSRS 2008 conference ▪ What is Research? ▪ Dangers of Poor Research or Prep
Week 2 - Aug. 31, Sept. 2	Plagiarism Topic Selection	▪ What Is ▪ Examples ▪ Interactive Quiz
Week 3 - Sept. 9	Technical Writing. Literature Survey.	▪ Writing a Paper ▪ Writing Style (ppt) ▪ Tips for writing technical papers ▪ Top 10 tips for writing a paper
Week 4 - Sept. 14, 16 Attendance mandatory 9/16	Research Approaches & Student Topic Discussion 9/16 - guest speaker, Edwin Guarin, Microsoft Research	▪ Microsoft Research ▪ Microsoft External Research (links) ▪ Microsoft Surface Parody (video) ▪ Life at Microsoft Parody (video) ▪ Microsoft Future Vision (video)
Week 5 - Sept. 21, 23	Note: No class mtg 9/21 Approaches & Discussion (cont'd)
	Road Trip on Sept. 21? University of Delaware Computer Science Research Day	Optional road trip for students who are interested, and can safely miss other classes.
Week 6 - Sept. 28, Sept. 30 Attendance mandatory 9/30	How to Give a Good Presentation Brief discussion of annotated bibliographies	▪ Marie desJardins slides ▪ Simon Peyton slides ▪ Presentation Feedback Form ▪ How to Give a Good Research Talk ▪File naming conventions
Week 7 - Oct. 5, 7	Literature Survey	▪ What is ▪ Example
Week 8 - Oct. 12, 14	Fall Break, no class meetings
Week 9 - Oct. 19, 21 Attendance mandatory 10/21	Literature Survey (cont'd) Research Topic Presentations (10/21) 10 mins. each	10/21 schedule: Cory Knobler Kristin Raudonis Gavin Hall Kevin Berry Casey Burkhardt John Barthmaier
Week 10 - Oct. 26, 28 Attendance mandatory 10/26 Attendance mandatory 10/28	Research Topic Present's. (cont'd)	10/26 schedule: Greg Francis James Farwell Jeremy Florence Carmen Nigro Allison Cohen (Nov. 11) 10/28 schedule: Zach Horst Eddie Orsi Nate Singleton Victoria Tran Vinnie Veltri Tim Vincent
Week 11 - Nov. 2, 4	Writing continuation
Week 12 - Nov. 9, 11 Attendance mandatory 11/11	Topics for discussion: Writing Report Abstracts Future Work & Conclusions Poster Presentation Software Demonstration	▪ How To ▪ Examples (Citeseer down?)
Week 13 - Nov. 16, 18 Attendance mandatory 11/18	Next steps for final paper How to run a conference How to create a research poster	Example proposals: ▪ Guidelines for Interactive Mapping of the World Wide Web ▪ Grading Tool Development and Analysis ▪ Web Technologies ▪ Data Object Storage System ▪ Programming for Biologists Conference organization Running a Conference
Week 14 - Nov. 23	Final Paper Polishing Preparation of posters Preparation of software demos Individual meetings only on Mon. 11/23, arrange with professor No class meeting on Wed. 11/25 due to Thanksgiving break	Poster tutorial
Week 15 Mon. Nov. 30 Attendance mandatory 11/30	CATS Final Planning Day	Students should bring their materials to class for review and feedback by the professor.
Wed. Dec. 2 Attendance mandatory 12/02	Final Research Presentations Conference-style: 10+2 max	1:30-1:42 Cory Knobler 1:43-1:55 Kristin Raudonis 1:56-2:08 Gavin Hall 2:09-2:21 Kevin Berry 2:22-2:34 Casey Burkhardt 2:35-2:47 Vinnie Veltri
Week 16 Mon. Dec. 7 Attendance mandatory 12/07	Final Research Presentations Conference-style: 10+2 max	1:30-1:42 Greg Francis 1:43-1:55 James Farwell 1:56-2:08 Jeremy Florence 2:09-2:21 Carmen Nigro 2:22-2:34 Tim Vincent 2:35-2:47 open slot
Wed. Dec. 9 Attendance mandatory 12/09	Final Research Presentations (cont'd) (Note that there is no final exam, but we may need the final exam time for remaining presentations)	1:30-1:42 Victoria Tran 1:43-1:55 Allison Cohen 1:56-2:08 Eddie Orsi 2:09-2:21 Nate Singleton 2:22-2:34 Zach Horst 2:35-2:47 open slot
Fri. Dec. 11 Reading Day 12-1pm Attendance highly recommended	Poster Presentation or Software Demo In conjunction with the Senior Projects, students should prepare a poster to present or software to demonstrate to share the fruits of our semester-long labors with others.	Location: Software Engineering Lab & Intelligent Systems Lab
Final Exam Period Tue. Dec. 15	Note: Any remaining final presentations during final exam period, 8:00-10:30am Because this is a research- and writing-oriented course, there is no traditional written final exam. The completed research paper and final presentation serve as a culminating assessment.

Resources

Literature Reviews

Paper Formatting

Standard ACM Conference paper format (MS Word)
General ACM paper formatting guidelines (pdf)

Paper Refereeing

Technical Writing

Future Work

Example: See "Future Directions" (section 5, page 9) in this paper.
Example: See a shorter example at the end of this paper.
Example: From "Towards Adaptive Web Sites", link is here.
Example: Longer example from "dc: A Live Webcast Control System" is here.
Example: From a dissertation, see example in Chapter 7 (7.2, page 181) here.

Presentations

Online Resources

CiteSeer
Google Scholar
ACM Digital Library
Media-Convert - translate between many file formats

Having Fun with Technical Writing

The Taxonomy of Barney - published in the Annals of Improbable Research
SCIgen - an automatic CS paper generator

Student Research Websites

Fall 2009: CSRS 2009 conference

Kevin Berry - Distributed and Grid Computing via the Browser
Casey Burkhardt - Techniques for Improving Accessibility of Mobile Applications for Blind and Visually Impaired Users
Allison Cohen - Speech into Text: Connecting the Bridges for the Hearing Repaired as well as Language Barriers
James Farwell - Cybernetics: Human-Computer Interaction and Benefits
Jeremy Florence - Web Design: Streamlining the Development Process Through Unification
Greg Francis - Character Animation Design
Gavin Hall - Identifying and Managing Internal Security Threats in Enterprise Systems
Zach Horst - 3D Computer Game Engines
Cory Knobler - Digital Evidence: The Future of Computing in Law Enforcement
Carmen Nigro - Bioinformatics: Sequence Alignment
Eddie Orsi - Net Neutrality: The fight between profit and freedom in the internet culture
Kristin Raudonis - Wireless Networks: Improving Performance Using Smart Antennas
Nate Singleton - Computerized Image Processing for Forgery Prevention
Victoria Tran - Music Composition using Artificial Intelligence
Vinnie Veltri - Methods and Uses of Face Recognition
Tim Vincent - Quantum Computing: Code Breaking and Secure Information

Fall 2008: CSRS 2008 conference

Tom Bryan - Network Security: Compromises and Countermeasures
Joe Charpentier - Radar Image Processing
Michael Hercenberg - Dynamic Learning of AI in Gaming
Nate Hower - Parallel Computing/AI: Artificial Neural Networks
Helen Magobet - Robotics: Step Advancement for the Robot ASIMO
Armin Mobasseri - Textual Analysis: Readability
A.J. Palkovic - Text Recognition in Images
Kristin Scudder - Strategies for Bionic Restoration of Movement
Tara Srihari - Using GIS and Remote Sensing for Natural Disaster Management
Vince Vuono - Interactive Storytelling via Intelligent Agents
Stephen Walter - Wireless Communication via Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vectoring
Elliot Whaley - Bionic Vision

Fall 2007: CSRS 2007 conference

Matt Blumenthal -- Encryption: Public-key cryptography
Jon Bruno -- Facial Recognition: Security Applications
Joe Bruno -- Low Interference Spanner Establisher
Andrew Chickadel -- An Approach to Interference in Wireless Networks: Vertex-Coloring
Xavier Halloran -- Wireless Networks: Implementing and testing the performance of wireless backbone networks
Kory Kirk -- Wireless Security
John McCoey -- Speech Recognition: Speech to Text Improvement
Dan Priece -- Parallel Computing: Implicit Parallelism
Minh Tran -- Guard Coverage in Wireless Networking

Updated 11/20/09