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The Working Paper as a Microcosm★ ofResearch Thought, Planning, and Execution

Prabal DuttaUniversity of Michigan

EECS 582March 12, 2013

★A miniature model of something

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The working paper model of research

• Basic tenet: write the paper as you do the research

• The working paper becomes– Sketchpad for early ideas (sometimes literally)

• Especially for titles, abstracts, intros, and conclusions

– Framework for structuring your thought (detailed outline)– Roadmap for research (“just” have to flesh out framework)– Notebook for capturing data– Medium for dialogue with others– Technical report (with an abundance of details)– Paper (submission) for communicating your ideas

• If people don’t know about your idea, then why bother?• Facilitates timely knowledge creation and dissemination

• A lot easier than writing the paper at the end!

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Writing informs research; Research informs writing

• Write the paper to crystallize and develop the idea

• Do the research to validate the ideas you wrote about

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Start with a project “codename”

• Pick something short, insightful, memorable, unique– iCount

• Current meter that works by counting regulator cycles– HiJack

• Plugs into audio jack from which it steals power and data

– PowerSockit (yes, it’s misspelled on purpose)• Power meter in socket form for “socking it [power]”

• Initially, codename serves as the project “handle”

• Could evolve to become the project name/title as well

• Probably best to avoid naming all code with it though!

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Choose a title at the beginning

• Have an idea? Brainstorm possible titles:– “Energy Metering for Free…”– “Meter Any Wire, Anywhere…”– “Hijacking Power and Bandwidth…”– “Shrinking and Greening the AC Power Meter”

• Forces you to – Think very early on about what you’re doing – and why

– Concisely articulate the core idea (sometimes difficult)

– Make clear and concrete what may now be cloudy and vague

• Not permanent though…

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Try to write the abstract next (it will change later)

• The “Four-Sentence Abstract” by Kent Beck– State the problem– Describe why the problem is important and interesting

– Describe what your solution achieves– Present the implications of the work

• An example abstract by Simon Peyton Jones– Many papers are badly written and hard to understand.

– This is a pity, because their good ideas may go unappreciated.

– Following simple guidelines can dramatically improve the quality of your papers.

– Your work will be used more, and the feedback you get from others will in turn improve your research.

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Telling the story through figures, tables, and great captions

• Challenge– Communicate your ideas clearly, concisely– Only require reader to read title, abstract, headings, figures, tables, and captions to understand and accept paper’s claims

• Figures– Visual presentation of ideas and results– Drawings of architecture, system design– Figures must serve a [stated] purpose– Illustrate trends in a variable– Illustrate relationship between variables

• Tables– Synthesize existing literature– Present experimentally-collected data– Use to communicate raw data, not relationships

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Great figures and captions

• Figure– Avoid titles– Axes must be labeled and readable– Axes must be scaled properly (linear, log, etc).

– Axes should start at zero (unless there’s a good reason)

– Units must be clear– Lines must be clear and distinguishable on B&W print

• Captions– First sentence: essentially a figure “title”– Second sentence: explanation of figure– Third sentence: implications of figure

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A rough outline to collect your thoughts

• Abstract• Introduction• Related Work• Overview• Design Focus on this area• Implementation• Evaluation Focus on this area• Discussion• Conclusion

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The design section answers why of what you did

• Focus on the essential design problems– Ignore incidental aspects– Avoid the “what I did on my summer vacation diary”

• Focus on the why rather than the what– The implementation will describe the what

• Develop conceptual models– The evaluation will validate these– They serve as an important contribution

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The evaluation answers the important questions

• Identify the set of experiments needed to answer the basic set of questions:– Does it work? How do you know?– Does it really work? Did you cover the corner cases?– Does it really, really work? Did you pick adversarial test conditions?

– When does it fail? Did you really identify the limits?

• Far better an approximate answer to the right question than a precise answer to the wrong one!

• What’s the background assumptions of the world?

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Evolve title and abstract over time

• Your understanding evolves with time and experience

• So evolve the title and abstract to match! Keep brainstorming…

• Ideally, a title should– Be succinct, unique, and descriptive– Convey the key insight, claim, or purpose of the work– Hook the casual reader to want to dig a little deeper– Use unusual but descriptive words that capture idea’s essence• “Hijack”, “Versatile”, “Procrastination”, “Low-Calorie”, “Disentangling”, “Oxymoron”, “For Free”, “Ephemeral”

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Homework (due Fri, 3/15 at 2:30pm)

• Select a project/problem– How?

• Describe the background– Things we should know to understand proposal

• Develop a testable hypothesis– Relates independent and dependent variables

• State the research methodology– How will the idea be tested?

• Brainstorm title– Write five possible paper titles to describe your project

– Get feedback from others about your titles, noting who

– Enumerate what people liked and did not like about them

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Homework (due Fri, 3/15 at 2:30pm)

• Abstract– Write a one paragraph abstract of your work– Must state a hypothesis or make a claim (implicit is not OK)

– OK to have placeholders in your claim• e.g. we achieve a factor X improvement• X will be determined by the research• Improvement is your hypothesis

• Sketch a paper outline• Do all this in LaTeX, and check into class repo

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Breaking the loop