Fall 2001

For each deliverable, please email the postscript as an attachment, or give me a printed copy. Please do not send the .dvi file.

Deadline 1 (bibtex file first draft): The goal for this deadline is to identify the world for your topic; that is, search for all papers relevant to your topic; not reading the papers, but determining relevance based on title and abstract. You should search in digital libraries (ACM, IEEE,...), recent conferences and workshops that cover your topic, and then use the bibliographies of recent papers to identify earlier relevant papers. The deliverable is a nicely formatted reference list, created by using bibtex and latex. This is an individual assignment.

Deadline 2 (group bibtex file+abstract): The goal for this deadline is bring together the bibliographies of the individual members of your group and discuss the overlapping and nonoverlapping papers in terms of their relevance to your topic. Also, you want to start to narrow down your topic to some kind of program analysis within the larger topic. Write a short 300 words or less abstract as part of your latex file to give me an idea of your planned directions of focus so I can judge whether you have covered the topic area adequately with our reference list. For this deadline, the goal is to have a mutually agreed upon, complete reference list among members of your group. The deliverable is a nicely formatted reference list and abstract, one per group.

Deadline 3 (Paper connections): The goal of this deliverable is to organize and categorize your reference list beyond a linear list. That is, you need to read the abstracts and look at bibliographies and start grouping papers that are on similar subtopics or addressing similar subproblems within your general topic. Group papers according to research groups and develop a timeline for the papers to better see how the field has progressed in your topic area. The deliverable is a picture that maps out your reference list, demonstrating the relative timing of the papers, the research groups, and the sets of papers that are addressing the same problems. Your picture can be some sort of graph or timeline with color for groupings. You can be creative in how you actually present your partitionings and categorizations. If you need more than one picture to demonstrate the relationships between papers, that is fine also. Again, you probably need to read more than abstracts, and maybe introductions and conclusions of the papers to do this task. You can split up this work among your group members and then discuss and create the picture together. The deliverable is one picture per group. It can be done by hand; don’t spend lots of time making it computer generated. I’m more interested in the content here than the presentation. It will not be included in your proposal.

Deadline 4 (Focus set identified): The goal of this deliverable is for you to identify the focus set of papers you all plan to actually read, review, and base your proposal on. This focus set should probably not be more than 10 papers. It depends on the amount of research that has already been done in the topic you have chosen. The deliverable is a separate reference list that contains only these papers, and a written justification for choosing this focus set put in a new section in the latex file called Focus Set, just after your abstract, which should remain in the latex file. There is one deliverable per group.

Deadline 5 (Paper reviews:1^st set): The goal of this deadline is to read and try to understand the overall goals, problems addressed, general approach, and restrictions of some subset of your focus set of papers. Each member of the group should read the set of papers identified as the first set, and prepare their own individual review form, found on the course web site. This form should be printed or downloaded and edited to prepare your review. The deliverable is a set of completed review forms, one form for each paper read by this deadline. There is one set of review forms for each member of the group, done individually. You are free to discuss the papers as a group, but you should complete your own forms.

Deadline 6 (Paper reviews:2^nd set): This deliverable is the same as the previous one, except focusing on the remaining set of focus papers.

Deadline 7 (Draft of literature survey): The goal for this deadline is what would typically be found in the Background and Related Work sections of a paper or proposal. You should read some Background and Related Work sections of papers to see how they are written. That is, a good literature survey does not just write a separate paragraph on every paper written in the field in any order you want.

* A good literature survey starts with a background section that familiarizes a computer science reader to the basic topic area, such as embedded systems – what are they, how are they characterized, examples from real life,...

*A good literature survey tries to group papers addressing similar problems and discuss and compare them together.

*A good literature survey also presents the papers typically in some chronological order within each problem identified.

*The most relevant papers to what you want to focus on are presented first, and then other papers that deal with problems related, but not so relevant, are discussed very briefly and sometimes only cited as a group with a single sentence. So, paragraphs are ordered from most relevant work to least relevant work to your chosen problem of interest.

* A good literature survey will do the following for the most relevant papers:

describe the overall goals/contributions of the paper, general approach and unique characteristics of their approach, then end with restrictions/limitations of that research. What didn’t they address? Did they implement it and evaluate it?

A related work section should be no more than 3 pages in the double column format you are given in the latex file. Most are more like 2 pages maximum. Each person in the group should write their own related work section. Again, you can discuss what you think are the most relevant and least relevant papers and agree on them as a group, but each member needs to learn how to write these surveys by writing them on their own. It takes time and sometimes rewriting to put it together as above. The deliverable is a nicely formatted document with your abstract from before, your Focus section, your Related Work section (done individually), and reference list.

Deadline 9 (Writeup of brainstorming): The goal for this deadline is to get the group to:

* review and discuss the key restrictions and limitations of existing research in the topic area

* write up a few paragraphs summarizing those limitations

* discuss the key open issues/problems left unaddressed by existing work

* write up a few paragraphs summarizing those key open issues

* brainstorm about possible approaches to attempt to address some subset of those key issues: applying some technique used in solving other problems in other domains, trying to develop new algorithms or alternate program representations,...

* write up a few paragraphs outlining the possible approaches you could propose for addressing these problems

* think about how would you evaluate the success of your proposed approach: what could be implemented, what metrics could be measured and experiments could be performed to judge whether your approach indeed addresses the problems or improves on previous approaches in some way (space, execution time, program analysis time,...)

The deliverable for this deadline is a nicely formatted document that includes:

* your proposal title

* a section called Current Limitations

* a section called Key Open Issues

* a section called Proposed Research, which consists of two subsections:

* Approach(es)

* Evaluation

You need only hand in one deliverable per group. These will be incorporated into each member’s own individual proposal file for the next deadline.

Deadline 10 (Draft of proposal): The goal for this deadline is a complete first draft of a research proposal, created by merging, integrating, and smoothing out your previous writings. This proposal should include the following components:

* Proposal Title

* abstract (probably rewritten now to reflect what you are addressing and your overall approach) (300 words or less)

* introduction (motivate the general topic and why it is worth studying, present overview of what goals your research has) (1-1 1/3 pages)

* background (give the computer science reader some background on your general topic area, as if they knew nothing about embedded systems or security,... and include your related work section as part of this background now (getting rid of the related work section title); end with a subsection called Limitations/unaddressed problems if appropriate.) (a few pages). So, this section includes your literature review (background and related work) and your current limitations writeup from your brainstorming session

* challenges and goals (enumerate the challenges and goals that you are focusing on (1 page max most likely). this can include the open issues that you wrote up for the brainstorming session.

* proposed research (present your proposed approach(es), subsectioning as appropriate., including an evaluation subsection (a few pages)

* research plan (enumerate the steps you will follow to do your research)(no more than ¾ page)

* summary of foreseen contributions - how will your work help society, summarize the contributions it would make if you indeed followed through with this research (2 paragraphs maximum)

* reference list

This draft is written individually by each member of the group. The deliverable is a nicely formatted first draft of a research proposal, one per group member.

Deadline 11 (Final version of proposal): The goal for this deadline is a rewritten, complete version of your research proposal, focusing on the suggestions for improvement by me and your own observed potential improvements. It has the same format as the previous deadline, and is also done individually.

Deadline 12 (oral presentation): The group will divide up a presentation of their research proposal. The presentation should include:

- Basic intro to the topic and motivation for the topic

- Background on the state-of-the-art in the topic

- Shortcomings in current approaches/Remaining issues

- Thesis statement

- Research goals/challenges

- Proposed research

- Research plan

- Foreseen contributions