CS Night Recommendations and Requirements

Materials Due November 22, 2006

  1. Title of poster
  2. Name(s) of presenter(s)
  3. Faculty sponsor
  4. Sponsoring organization (if appropriate)
  5. Course number and name (if appropriate)
  6. One-paragraph abstract
  7. Special requests, such as space for laptop, or extra space for demos

Abstract Recommendations

Following are a couple of links with useful information about the structure of a research abstract:

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/essays/abstract.html
http://research.berkeley.edu/ucday/abstract.html

In general, there are 4 or 5 main components you should be sure to include. Dejan Milojicic, my former boss, always recommended the following structure:
  1. Context Setting - Provide a motivation for your work. Why is your area interesting? What changes have recently occurred to motivate the need for your work?
  2. Consequence of this - Discuss why there is a need for your new technology. Why aren't current technologies sufficient? Is there a hard problem you are solving?
  3. Outrageous claim - What are the key elements of your solution/work?
  4. Consequences - What will be the impact of your work? Who will be affected by this new technology?
An annotated example follows:

(Context setting) Pervasive computing devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and laptop computers are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. The future promises even more advanced devices such as digital watches, jewelry, and even clothing.

(Consequence of this) However, as pervasive devices become more widely used for more advanced applications, their resource limitations are becoming more apparent.

(Outrageous claim) In this work, we investigate the benefit of using power-aware schemes to automatically manage content across a collection of devices. We monitor the available energy supply on each device and migrate content from devices that are in danger of dying to prolong data availability.

(Consequences) In our simulated environment, we have found that, using intelligent techniques for data management can increase the amount of time a collection of devices remains usable by over 2 times. Furthermore, our techniques can perform autonomously, independent of user intervention.

Poster Recommendations

Following are links to several web pages that discuss how to design a poster:

http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds3-2/posters.html
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Programs/ugrad/UgradResearch/katz_postertips.htm
http://www.ncsu.edu/project/posters/NewSite/

Finally, the following web page links to several photos of posters from MobiSys 05. Check out the dorks in Sorber2.jpg!
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~dntilkid/mobisys/

Sami Rollins