The final deliverable for this class is a write-up on your project. This paper is due in the “IEEE Conference” format and should extend not more than 3 pages for single student projects, 5 pages for 2 student teams and 6 pages for 3 student teams.
Roughly, there are three classes of papers:
- original research
- tutorial
- survey
Research paper
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Materials & Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- Conclusion
The abstract summarizes your paper in a few sentences. What is the problem you want to solve, what is the method you are employing, what are you doing to assess your work, and what is the final outcome.
The introduction should describe the problem that you are solving and why it is important. A good guideline to write a good introduction are the Heilmeier questions:
- What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
- How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
- What’s new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
- Who cares?
- If you’re successful, what difference will it make?
- What are the risks and the payoffs?
Hypothesis: What do we learn from this work?
It can be somewhat hard to actually frame your work into a single sentence, so what to do if it seem not to work? One reason might be that you are actually trying to accomplish too many things. Can you really describe them all in depth in a 6 page document? If yes, maybe some are very minor compared to the others. If this is the case, they are either supportive of your main idea and can be rolled into this bigger piece of work or they are totally disconnected. If they are disconnected leave them out for the sake of improving your main message. Finally, you might feel that you don’t have a main message, but consider all the things you done equally worthy, and despite answering the Heilmeier questions you cannot fill up more than three pages. In this case you might consider picking one of your approaches and dig deeper by comparing it with different methods.
Being able to come up with a one-sentence elevator pitch framed as a hypothesis will actually help you to set the scope of the work that you need to do for a class project. How good do you need to implement, design or describe a certain component of your project? Well, good enough to follow through with your research objective.
Survey and Tutorial
The goal of a survey is to classify work – potentially from different communities – into different categories. Doing this synthesis and establishing common language and formalism is the survey’s main contribution. A survey following such an outline is a possible deliverable for an independent study or a PhD prelim, it does not lend itself to describe your efforts on a focused research project. Rather, it might result from your involvement in a relatively new area in which you feel important connections between disjoint communities and common language has not been established. A different category of survey, however, critically examines concurring methods to solve a particular problem. For example, you might have set out to study manipulation, but get stuck in selecting the right sensor suite from the many available options. What sensor is actually best to accomplish a specific task? A survey which answers this question experimentally will follow the same structure as a research paper (see above).
A tutorial is closely related to a survey, but focuses more on explaining specific technical content, e.g, the workings of a specific class of algorithms or tool, commonly used in a community. A tutorial might be an appropriate way to describe your efforts in a research project, which can serve as illustration to explain the workings of a specific method you used.
Writing it up!
Writing a research report that contains equations, figures and references requires some tedious book-keeping. Although technically possible, word processing programs quickly reach their limitations and will lead to frustration. In the scientific community Latex has emerged as a quasi standard for typesetting research documentation. Latex is a mark-up language that strictly divides function and layout. Rather than formatting individual items as bold, italic and the like, you mark them up as emphasized, section head etc, and specify how things look elsewhere. This is usually provided by a template provided by the publisher (or your own). The IEEE guidelines and templates are available here.
A good introduction to get you started with Latex is “The not so short introduction into Latex2e“. For Windows, you can download the Miktex Latex distribution, which comes with an integrated editor.