CS 591SN

Fall 2006

New Systems and Networking Seminar

FRIDAYS 1.30 PM - 2.30 PM, 1103 Siebel Center (confirmed)

(First Meeting of the Seminar is on September 1)

Optional Credit: 1 hour
(You can retake the course even if you have taken it in previous semesters.)

Mailing List: cs591sn at cs dawt uiuc dot edu. To subscribe/unsubscribe, visit here

Previous Versions of Seminar: [Fall 2005] [Spring 2006]

Suggestions on Doing a Good Presentation

Latest News and Announcements

Schedule

One Page Information Handout: [pdf] (alternatively: [ppt])

Feedback Form (all presenters receive feedback from attendees via this form)

Organizers: Systems Faculty at the CS and ECE departments, UIUC.

Point of Contact: Indranil Gupta (indy at cs dawt uiuc dot edu). Other contacts: Nitin Vaidya, Robin Kravets, Haiyun Luo.

This seminar is devoted to a critical analysis of the new and latest papers in hot topics of systems and networking (includes traditional systems, wired and wireless networking, distributed systems, multimedia networked systems, and much much more). Best papers and award-quality papers will be selected from conferences of interest (including but not limited to SIGCOMM, MOBICOM, MOBISYS, INFOCOM, SOSP, Usenix workshops, NSDI, Sensys, ICDCS, DSN, and others) and prominent journals, if necessary. 

There are 2 goals for this seminar:

1. Introduce systems and networking students to a breadth of top-notch and award quality papers that everyone else in the systems&networking is talking about today.

2. Have students give top-quality presentations, and prepare themselves for future job talks.

Students will be able to obtain 1 hour credit for this seminar -- please register through the usual channels for CS 591 SN. 

Suggestions on Doing a Good CS591SN presentation

• Use examples - the more and the earlier, the better. It improves clarity.
• Use pictures - the more, the better. It improves clarity.
• Use text only where absolutely necessary - it puts folks to sleep and makes them ask more nasty questions.
• Jump into the "meat" of the paper as quickly as possible - within the first 3 slides is best.
• Anticipate questions that you're likely to get - better still, prepare slides that have answers (or non-answers) to these questions.
• Try to do justice to the authors' contribution, but also make sure you state alongside what your personal/research opinion is about each of the authors' design decisions (this can pre-empt questions, esp. if the design decision is questionable).
• Remember - if you didn't write the paper, you can question everything in it. But at the same time, there is a reason why it got into a top conference.  
• Finally, keep track of time, because it is the only thing guaranteed to increase monotonically.
• Also finally, don't be discouraged or feel bad if lots of nasty questions were asked in your presentation. The original paper was probably not so good, and/or your presentation exposed the shortcomings of the paper (which is a good thing anyway). 

SCHEDULE

Note: If you are signed up for credit, and/or would like to present a paper, please contact the appropriate "Faculty Host" (see below) for the session in which your chosen paper belongs. If no papers are listed for that session yet, you may also send paper suggestions to the faculty host.

News and Announcements:

8/20: One Page Handout: [pdf] (alternatively: [ppt])

8/20: Mailing List: cs591sn at cs dawt uiuc dot edu. To subscribe, visit here

8/20: First meeting of the group will be on September 1, 2006 at 1103 in TBD Siebel Center. It is mandatory for students to show up, especially if they're taking the course for credit.it.

Report broken links to indy at cs dawt uiuc dawt edu

(c) ig