CompSci 725 Handout 6: Oral Presentations, Projects and Term Reports - PowerPoint Presentation

CompSci 725Handout 6: Oral Presentations, Projects and Term Reports1 August 2012 Clark Thomborson University of Auckland

1-Aug-12 Assessment: 15% oral seminar You will deliver an oral presentation on one of the required readings, during a lecture period. Your slideshow should focus your classmates’ attention on one or two important aspects of your article, showing your critical and appreciative understanding. (7%)You must present a draft of your slideshow to the instructor, one week before your scheduled presentation date. The instructor will give you some ideas on how to improve your presentation. (1%)You must present your slideshow in 4.5 to 7.5 minutes. (2%)There should be at least one thought-provoking question in your slideshow. (2%)You must participate in the question-and-answer session run by the instructor after your presentation. (3%) 2

1-Aug-12 3 Slideshow Organisation You should prepare about six slides for a six-minute seminar. I suggest the following order: A title slide, with full bibliographic information ( required! ) on the article you are presenting; A one-sentence summary of the article; One critical comment and one appreciative comment, indicating why you think your fellow students should read this article and what important results (or mistakes) they should watch out for; An explanation (2 or 3 slides) of one of your comments; A question to stimulate discussion.

4 Appreciation and Criticism Your appreciative comment should indicate WHAT you think is good and WHY you think it is good.An article may offer an explanation, taxonomy, experimental measurement, security analysis, technological design, or proof of correctness. This is a “what”. Be careful to focus on a single contribution from the article.Imagine a computer security professional asking you the following question: “why should I try to understand the contribution you have identified?” Do not try to provide a full explanation of the “what”. Your audience must re-read the relevant section of the article, and think about it, to learn something non-trivial – and if you are appreciating a trivial aspect of the article, then this is a “backhanded compliment” and not a valid appreciation.Your critical comment might alert your classmates to an error in an equation, an undisclosed experimental setup, or a limitation on the validity or applicability of the claimed results. 1-Aug-12

1-Aug-12 5 What makes a question “good”? Your question should challenge your fellow students to compare/contrast/combine the comments in your oral presentation, with the articles (if any) that have been presented previously in this class, and general knowledge of computer science. Your question should be answerable by anyone who has a broad undergraduate education in computer science, and is able to reflect critically and appreciatively on all assigned readings, all oral presentations, and all prior discussions in COMPSCI 725 lecture periods. Your question should stimulate creativity and analysis, and should not require memory of technical detail. Your question should be appropriate for a short-answer question requiring a few minutes on a closed-book final exam.

1-Aug-12 6 Creating your Oral Presentation Write some critical & appreciative comments after reading your article very carefully. Construct a first draft of your presentation: use PowerPoint or your favourite presentation builder (but not MS Word!). Rehearse your draft presentation by yourself, and then rehearse with a friend. Revise your draft presentation after each rehearsal. Add a question if you haven’t done so already. Deliver your draft presentation at a tutorial, in the week prior to your scheduled presentation date at COMPSCI 725 lectures. (Carry your presentation file to the tutorial room on a USB stick, or on your laptop.) Prepare a final version of your presentation slides, after hearing comments from the lecturer and other student(s) at tutorial. Carry your final-version presentation slides to the COMPSCI 725 lecture on a USB stick , on the day scheduled for your presentation. Your presentation file will be mounted on the class website. You’ll probably spend 10 hours preparing a good 6-minute presentation!

1-Aug-12 7 Your Lecturers’ Expectations Presenters should show appreciative and critical understanding of their article, through the contents of their slides their oral comments when presenting their slides, and their handling of the discussion. Non-presenters should have read the article before the presentation begins . All students should have a working knowledge of what was presented & discussed in class. This will be tested in your final examination.

1-Aug-12 Assessment: 25% term paper You must demonstrate your critical and appreciative understanding of at least three professional publications relevant to software security.At least one of your references must be a required reading for this course.You must also cite and (at least briefly) discuss any other required class reading that is closely related to the topic of your term paper. You must make full and accurate bibliographic references to archival sources . Approximately 10 pages. Technical words must be spelled and used correctly.No plagiarism!I will publish your paper online, if you request this: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/courses/compsci725s2c/archive/termpapers 8

9 Detailed Requirements Your paper should consist of eight to twelve pages of 12-point type with generous margins and 1.5 line spacing. Enforcement is indirect. A longer paper takes much longer to write well. A shorter paper is unlikely to show strong critical and appreciative understanding. If you use someone else’s words, you must put these in quotation marks and add a reference to your source.I will report extensive plagiarism to the HoD, for possible disciplinary action.Use your own words, except when quoting definitions or other people’s opinions. Light paraphrase (i.e. changing a few words) of a declared source implies that you have a very poor understanding of the technical meaning of your source material. Light paraphrase of an undeclared source is plagiarism – and it implies that you have tried to hide your plagiarism by paraphrasing . Declare your source!Try to match the style of one of the articles you read in this class.Technical words must be spelled and used correctly. You should use a spell-checker and a grammar checker (e.g. MS Word), however we will not mark you down for grammatical mistakes and spelling errors on non-technical words (if your meaning is clear). Reports are due at 4pm on Friday 12 October.

Getting StartedWhen reading your article for your oral report, you should think about using it as a basis for a term paper .Any required reading may form the basis of your paper.Structural ideas:Compare/contrast your article’s technology (or analysis, or research finding) to some other published work.Think about how your article could be extended, find one or two articles discussing a similar extension, then write about the feasibility and desirability of this extension.Clarify a point of confusion or difficulty in your article. (Did anyone citing your article mention this problem?)Formulate a “research question”, and update it as you learn more. Try to form an interesting question which you can answer in your term paper. (Draw the bulls-eye around your arrow ;-) 1-Aug-12 10

1-Aug-12Suggested Search Process Find at least one “good” source, from your required readings.Find more good sources by…Finding sources that cite your “good” source (use http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs or Web of Science). Finding sources that are cited by your “good” source (use its bibliographic information)Finding other sources written by the author(s) and co-authors of your “good” source (use www.google.com to find their website; use http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/ to find their pubs)Identify key words and phrases , use these to search with Google scholar, library databases. Look at “nearby” articles: same journal, same conference . Narrow your topic, to limit the number of relevant sources . You should find two to five highly-relevant sources, and you should be confident that other scholars on the same topic would identify these. Use scholarly (archival) sources . Do not rely on Wikipedia, magazines, personal webpages, blogs, tutorials; dig deeper to discover a credible source! 11

FeedbackStudents who would like feedback from an instructor on their term paper should send an email containing A proposed topic (one or two sentences; not just a word or phrase),Bibliographic detail on a “base” article (this should be a required reading), andBibliographic detail (at least author, title, DOI, year) on any other proposed references. We will endeavour to respond within seven days to all such emails, if they are sent before the end of Week 7 (Friday, 14 September).1-Aug-1212