Information about the Course Paper/Project

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Please read all of the instructions, carefully and follow them.

Due Date

• Paper Due: TBA
• Reviews Due: TBA
  • Blank Review Form (to be filled in)
  • NOTE: papers and reviewers will be assigned a number.
    Submissions of reviews must be named "review-paper#-reviewer#.txt".
    Reviews must be in ASCII text and stictly follow the instructions given in the review form.
• Both to be received as attachments emailed by to me.
• Remember to put CS854 in the subject line!
• Be sure to allow time for delivery of the email.

Format

• PLEASE: Use only Times Roman and Courier fonts. Other fonts do not print properly in all cases.
• 8 page maximum
• Use format templates available at the USENIX site (see bullet point number 6).
• Submit one PDF file using your given name (not your family name). E.g., mine would be tim.pdf

Content

Experiments and results are nice but not required (provided you have approval for that type of project during your proposal).

This is really an exercise in writing. You can think of it as either writing a portion of a research proposal, a position paper, or something like a HotOS/HotNets/HotPar style of paper.

No programming is required and no results are required. However, you are required to write well and to make sound, logical, and convincing arguments. In fact if you do happen to include the greatest experiments and results in the world but you you don't properly explain what the problem is, why people should care about the problem, etc. you will not do very well.

Be sure that you cover the following:

• What is the problem?
• What is the motivation for studying this problem? Make the case that the problem is an important problem and that it is worth studying?
• What is the related work? For the purposes of this course concentrate on just a few of the key papers in the area and only a few of those most closely related to your proposal or idea. Be sure to concentrate not just on what previous work has done but exactly how it related to what you are proposing to do. How is what you are proposing different, similar, better, and possibly worse (be open and honest about this).
• What is the research you are proposing?
• What are the goals of the research? How will it make the world a better place? What are the expected research contributions?
• What are the strengths and weakness of your approach when compared with others?
• Describe how you might demonstrate that your goals have been achieved. Is there a measurement you will use, what will be the metric, how will that metric be obtained? If you can, describe how you might conduct the research. Would you prove some theorems, construct an analytic model, run some simulations, conduct some experiments? What tools might you use? What tools might you need to build? What kind of environment/equipment/lab might be required and is what you are proposing feasible in some reasonable time-frame by a reasonably sized group of people. It won't be very convincing if it seems to the reader like it would take 40 people, 30 years to build and once it was built would require 1000 years of experiments before getting results :-)
• See the advice provided for writing a thesis and use the hints provided there when doing and writing up your project.
  A Simple Approach to Thesis Writing
  
  
• IMPORTANT: before handing in your paper,
  1. Proofread it carefully and correct all of the mistakes that you find.
  2. Then do it again, and again, and again.
  3. Then have a friend read the paper to look for mistakes.
  4. Then repeat from the top until you are pretty certain that the writing is in clear and correct English and that there aren't any typos and smelling spelling mistakes :-)