CS 2001: Research Topics in Computer Science

Fall 2014

General Information

Organizer:

    Professor Diane Litman
    Offices: 5105 Sennott Sq; 741 LRDC
    Email: litman -at- cs.pitt.edu
    Phone: 412-624-8838

Meeting Times:

TH 1:00 - 2:15 PM, 6516 SENSQ
F TBA (alternate, rarely used)

Office Hours:

Any time my door is open

Announcements

[10/28] Course project assigned, due Tuesday December 9 using Courseweb .
[9/23] Student Presentation Instructions: Each GROUP (no matter when you are actually presenting) should email me one copy of the final talk by NOON on Thursday September 25th! Each STUDENT should then separately upload this talk into ARROW. Finally, each STUDENT should print out 3 copies of the Review Form (see the syllabus) and bring it to class to take notes for later entry into ARROW.
[8/29] Based on the poll, our alternate meeting time will Friday at 11. This will rarely be used, but sometimes is necessary.
[8/29] First homework assigned, due Tuesday September 2 at noon using Courseweb. .

Course Description

This course introduces first year graduate students to research being conducted in the Computer Science Department. The course will also introduce students to the research process in general. All first year Ph.D. students are required to take this course. Masters students are welcome, since the course is open to all Computer Science graduate students, but it does not count towards the MS degree.

Grading:

Attendence: 50%
Paper reviews: 25%
Presentation: 10%
Mini-project: 15%

Lecture/Talk Schedule

Class #

Date

Topics

Resources

8/26 (Tue)

Administrivia and Introduction [Notes]

8/28 (Thu)

Paper Reading [Notes]

S. Keshav, How to Read a Paper, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 37(3) : 83-84, July 2007.

A newer version of this paper can be found here
Michael J. Hanson and Dylan J. McNamee, Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology
Philip W. L. Fong, How to Read a CS Research Paper, July 2004.
William G. Griswold, How to Read an Engineering Research Paper
Griswold's paper comprehension template
Paper for homework (pdf)

DUE

9/2 (Tue)

Paper Reviewing [Notes]

Mark Hill and Kathryn S. McKinley, Notes on Constructive and Positive Reviewing, May 2005.
Alan Jay Smith, The Task of the Referee, IEEE Computer 23(4), April 1990.
Timothy Roscoe, Writing reviews for systems conferences, March 2007.
William Strunk, Jr. The Elements of Style, 1918
(reference material, don't need to read before class)

9/4 (Thu)

No Class

9/9 (Tue)

Scripting, plotting, LaTeX [Notes]
(Student Lecturer: Fan Zhang)

Slides and scripts from class [zip]
LaTeX distributions
- Linux: TeX Live
- Mac OSX: MacTeX
- Windows: MiKTeX
Helpful cheat sheets
- LaTeX
- GNUPlot

9/11 (Thu)

Department computing resources, SVN, Condor, etc. [Notes]
(Student Lecturer: Wencan Luo)

SVN Quick Reference Card
Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick, and C. Michael Pilato, Version Control with Subversion

9/16 (Tue)

Giving a research talk [Notes]
[talk version1 (pptx), talk version2 (pptx)]

Michael Ernst, Giving a technical presentation
Jonathan Shewchuk, Giving an Academic Talk
Charles Van Loan, The Short Talk

9/18 (Thu)

Peer Review Software [Notes]
(Student Lecturer: Huy Nguyen)

Create your ARROW account
Panther Learning (commercial) version of Arrow
Cho, K., & Schunn , C. D. (2007). Scaffolded writing and rewriting in the discipline: A web-based reciprocal peer review system. Computers & Education, 48 (3), 409-426

9/23 (Tue)

Research Integrity
(Faculty Lecturer: Prof. Bob Daley)

The following must be read before lecture:

NEW! Links from Prof. Daley's presentation

9/25 (Thu)

Student Presentations I (20 minutes each)

Paper 1: Ge and Guo
Paper 1: Huang and Li
Paper 4: Yin, Zhang, and Zhao

Prince Mahajan, Srinath Setty, Sangmin Lee, Allen Clement, Lorenzo Alvisi, Mike Dahlin, and Michael Walfish, Depot: Cloud Storage with Minimal Trust, Proc. Operating Systems Design and Implementation, 2010.
Myle Ott,Yejin Choi, Claire Cardie, and Jeffrey Hancock, Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination. Proc. Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, 2011.
Sruthi Bandhakavi, Prithvi Bisht, P. Madhusudan, V.N. Venkatakrishnan, CANDID: preventing SQL injection attacks using dynamic candidate evaluations, Proc. Computer and Communication Security, 2007.
Tao Zhang, Ke Chen, Cong Xu, Guangyu Sun, Tao Wang and Yuan Xie, Half-Dram: a High-bandwidth and Low-power DRAM Architecture from the Rethinking of Fine-grained Activation, Proc. ISCA, 2014.
Review Form

9/30 (Tue)

Student Presentations II

Paper 2: Jiang and Lee
Paper 2: Liu and Lugini
Paper 2: Ong, Raghu and Eshaghzadeh Torbati

10/2 (Thu)

Student Presentations III

Paper 3: Alaerjan, Alseghayer and Nguyen

Discussion of presentations with Prof. Litman

From this point on, you must read and write a review of one of the two papers posted for each week. The paper review template that you should fill out and then upload into ARROW can be found here. After this upload, you will have one more week to provide 3 peer reviews of other students' uploads using ARROW (just for the assignment that you submitted to). For general guidance consult your notes from classes 2 and 3. Both your review of one faculty paper, and your peer reviews of 3 student reviews from the prior week, are due by midnight on each Sunday.

10/7 (Tue)

Professor Zhang

pdf

10/9 (Thu)

Professor Chang

doc

NOTE - class will be from 1:40-2:20 today

10/14 (Tue)

Fall Break

10/16 (Thu)

Professor Childers

pdf