Seminar: Summer Semester 2018

In the Summer Semester 2018 we offer a Master seminar “Software Engineering” (cf. 89-3372).

Organization

You can register for this seminar or the seminar offered by Prof. Rombach at the OLAT website until March 18th (23:59 h). An enrollment in both seminars is not possible. Usually we have more students than available seminar places. Hence, we will decide by early April which students are selected from the enrollment list for the seminar. So the enrollment just states your interest in participation, the selection of students will be announced by beginning of April.

Schedule

  • Registration deadline: March 18
  • Kickoff Meeting: Thursday, May 3, 10:00-11:30, room 11-260 (slides, Latex slides)
  • Extended Abstract submission: Tuesday, May 22, 23:59
  • First draft of paper: Monday, June 18, 23:59
  • Presentations: Thursdays, 10:00-11:30, room 11-260
    • June 21
    • June 28
    • July 5
  • Final paper: July 16, 23:59

Deadlines are strict: Failing to submit a document by the end of the deadline-day means failing the seminar.

Attendance and active participation on all presentation days is mandatory.

Topics

The topic of this seminar is “functional data structures”. Check the detailed list of topics for more information.

Contact

If you have any questions concerning our seminar please send an e-mail to Peter Zeller.

General Remarks

The goal of a seminar is to introduce students to the major constituent of scientific method that is concerned with critically reading, understanding, summarizing, explaining and presenting existing scientific papers. The following links present this goal in more detail: General guidelines for seminars in English and German. This seminar in particular provides the students opportunity to get acquainted with the research in software engineering.

You will get a scientific paper, which you will have to explain in a term paper (10-15 pages LNCS style, details are given below). Your paper should be understandable by an average master-level computer science student, so you usually have to provide more background information, than what is given in the original paper. In particular this includes a clear description of the problem, a good motivation, and an understandable representation of the solution proposed by the original paper. Your paper may also include critique of the of the original paper, if appropriate.

You will also present the paper to other students. This presentation will take 20 minutes with around 10 minutes for questions and discussions.

Successful participation in the seminar requires:

  • Term Paper
  • Presentation

Language

The seminar has to be done in English.

Term paper

You have to officially submit three versions of your paper.

  1. Extended abstract:

    An abstract is a short (often 100-250 words) summary of a paper, which helps potential readers to decide, whether they should read a paper or not. An abstract often has 4 parts:

    1. A motivation/problem statement, which explains what the topic and scope of the paper is and what problem it tries to solve.
    2. A brief statement about what approach/methods were used to address the problem.
    3. A summary of the results of the paper, which show the reader what was achieved.
    4. A conclusion which summarizes the contributions/usefulness of the results.

    The extended abstract you should write is similar but longer (at least 2 pages). You should focus on the motivation and problem statement and the main ideas of your topic, but you don’t have to go into technical details yet. The extended abstract can later be reused to write the introduction to your paper.

    You should discuss with your supervisor what exactly should go into the extended abstract.

  2. First draft:

    This should be a full paper including everything you want to have in the final paper.

  3. Final paper:

    You will get feedback about your first draft, which you have to incorporate into the final version. Depending on the quality of your first draft, this can range from making a few changes to rewriting the complete paper.

Style

The term paper must be written in LaTeX and use the style provided in our template:

Your paper must be 10-15 pages long (including figures, references, etc.; however, you should not use big figures as space filler to get to 10 pages). Please submit the paper as a PDF file.

Here are some advice on writing your term paper in addition to the general guidelines:

Presentation

You are free to use your favorite program and style for creating your presentation slides. If you want to use the official university style, you can use the respective Latex template or Powerpoint template.

Some bright people have given up their time to write some tips on how to do a presentation. As with other tips given on this page, we can’t encourage you enough to read them.