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How to Search, Read, Write, and Present a Paper

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How to search papers• Google.com• Major conferences

– In the areas of wireless communications/mobile computing: • IEEE INFOCOM: http://www.ieee-infocom.org/• ACM SIGCOMM: http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigcomm/• ACM MOBICOM: http://www.sigmobile.org/mobicom/• ACM MobiHoc: http://www.sigmobile.org/mobihoc/• ACM SenSys: http://www.sigmobile.org/sensys/• ACM MobiSys: http://www.sigmobile.org/mobisys/

– In the areas of security: • IEEE Synposium on Security & Privacy:

http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP-Index.html• ACM CCS: http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigsac/ccs/• NDSS: http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/ndss/• Usenix Security: http://www.usenix.org/events/bytopic/security.html• International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID):

http://www.raid-symposium.org/• CRYPTO: http://www.iacr.org/conferences/crypto2005/• …

– Just because a conference is “IEEE” or “ACM” or “International” does not mean it is very good

– Only a few conferences in any area are worth publishing in

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How to Search Papers

• Major Journals: Journals are a few years behind, but more comprehensive and can still be useful

• Technical reports from active research group

• Survey/Overview papers:– ACM Computing surveys, CACM, IEEE

Computer..

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Why Read/Not Read Papers

• Why read?– Find interesting topics– Know the current status in one area

• Why not read?– Cannot and should not read everything– Can suppress innovation

• once you see solutions using a particular theme, often hard to think differently

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How to Read Papers

• Abstract• Introduction• Motivation• Problem Description• Solution• …• Performance analysis• Conclusion• Future Work

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When you read papers• What problems are the authors trying to solve?

Are they important problems? Why or why not?• What new architecture, algorithm, mechanism,

methodology, or perspective are the authors proposing? (How is the new idea different from all other ideas?)

• What are the usefulness and practicality of the idea?

• Be skeptical• If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not

be called research, would it? - Albert Einstein

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When you read papers

• What to evaluate?– What need to be evaluated to confirm the worthiness

of the new idea? For example, runtime, throughput, cache miss ratio, utilization, etc.?

• How to evaluate?– conduct the evaluation? – prove theorems or not?– run simulations ?– build a system ?– collect traces from existing systems ?

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When you read papers

• Was the Evaluation Correct and Adequate? – How was their data collection done?– Do you agree with their analysis of the data?– Do you agree with their conclusions about the

data?– Do you have new interpretation of their data?– Can you suggest new ways to evaluate their

idea?

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When you read papers

• Assumptions, Drawbacks, Extensions: – Can you think of other aspects of their idea that need

to be evaluated?– Can you think of extensions or modifications to their

idea to improve it?– How would you evaluate your improvement?– Can you apply their idea or method of evaluation to

your own project?– Do the authors make any assumptions that are not

valid/realistic?– Can you come up with a more general solution that

does not rely on one or more of the assumptions the authors make?

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When you write papers

• Most papers are not that exceptional

• Good writing makes significant difference

• Better to say little clearly, than saying too much unclearly

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How to write a systems paper

• Provide sufficient information to allow people to reproduce your results– People may want to reproduce exciting results– Reviewers expect this information

• Do not provide wrong information

• Sometimes hard to provide all details in available space– May be forced to omit some information– Judge what is the most essential to the experiments– Cite a tech report for more information

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How to write a theory paper

• Readers should be able to understand contributions without reading all details

• If some proof are not too important, relegate them to an appendix

• Make it formal

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Discuss Related Work

• Explain how your work relates to state of the art• Discuss relevant past work by other people too• Do not offend people

– Avoid: The scheme presented by XXX performs terribly

– Prefer: The scheme presented by XXX does not perform as well in scenario X as it does in scenario Y

• If your ideas do not work well in some interesting scenarios, tell the reader

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Reference

• The format of the reference• Example:

– J. Broch, D. A. Maltz, D. B. Johnson, Y.-C. Hu, and J. Jetcheva, “A performance comparison of multi-hop wireless ad hoc network routing protocols,” in Proc. 4th Annu. ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom’98), Dallas, TX, 1998, pp. 85–97.

– S. E. Deering, D. Estrin, D. Farinacci, V. Jacobson, C. Liu, and L. Wei, “The PIM architecture for wide-area multicast routing,” IEEE Trans. Networking, vol. 4, pp. 153–162, Apr. 1996.

– Y. Yu, R. Govindan, and D. Estrin, “Geographical and energy aware routing: A recursive data dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks,” Univ. California, Los Angeles, Tech. Rep. UCLA/CSD-TR-01-0023, 2001.

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How to present a paper

• Motivation and Problem Statement – Why should anyone care?– Remember: people in audience may not be working on your

problem• Related Work• Your Methods• Results• Summary

– Conclusion and Future Work

• Backup Slides– Optionally have a few slides ready (not counted in your talk total)

to answer expected questions.

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How to present a paper

• Use Powerpoint– Pay attention to the color and font size– Use illustrations/pictures to explain complex

algorithms– Use examples