Submission of Final version of the Thesis |
Here is information regarding UO Research guidelines on the
electronic submission of the thesis:
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Support |
If you
are a new/prospective student interested in working with me on a
research project please read the following carefully. Due to the
large volume of email I receive from prospective students, I don't have
time to respond to most email individually. Thus if you send me
unsolicited email with questions that are answered below, I will not
reply.
- If
you are considering University of Ottawa graduate program as a MSc
or PhD student in either Computer
Science or Electrical and
Computer Engineering, I encourage you to apply. However I
don't make admission decisions. They are made by the admissions
committee. Please apply directly to the university and the
department. Please don't contact me directly about
admissions questions. I will ignore all such emails.
- If
you are a prospective graduate student and you have some prior
background in Multimedia Communications and/or Web
Engineering (courses, projects etc.) then send me a brief email
in about yourself, your research interests and so on.
- If
you have indicated clearly in your Statement of Purpose that you
want to work in Multimedia Communications or Web
Engineering, then I probably already know who you are. I will
contact you directly if I am interested in offering you a position
in my group.
- Support is
always subject to the availability of funds, and you must realize
that the grants I receive are subject to renewal and can be cut
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Goals |
- My
goal, as a professor, is to ensure that you, as a student have the
highest possible quality education:
- An environment for the student that is
conducive to research and in which the student can grow
intellectually will be provided;
- We will establish a realistic timetable for
completion of various phases of the project;
- I consider every graduate student as a "junior
colleague in research";
- Your
goal, as a student should be to strive for excellence in research,
therefore you:
- Maintain open communication with me concerning
any problem, either real or perceived;
- A thesis (especially a Ph.D.) should not only contain
a word-description of some new ideas or services but also a
complete specification of these ideas in a formalism, such as a
protocol or language. Implementation and Performance analysis
then should be done.
- A master thesis could be a tool or an application
that proof a new concept. Anyway, here also Implementation
and
Performance analysis should be done. Some Master theses however
require a deep theoretical analysis and need then to discuss
almost all available related work and to analyze the
differences between the new model and the already existing
ones.
- Scalability issues are key and should be studied
analytically by simulation, or real experiments. In any case,
(the issue that makes me very very very upset) is PLAGIARISM.
It must be avoided by all means. To exactly understand the
concept of PLAGIARISM and how to avoid it, please refer again
to: http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~elsaddik/abedweb/teaching/plagiarism.pdf
- More over Master thesis can not be submitted and
defended before the student write one good conference paper
or - at least - shows an attempt to write one, while a Ph.D.
thesis requires at least two journals and several conference
publications.
- Last but not least, I need a progress report every
month (30th of the month). I need to discuss your progress and
ideas at least once a month personally with you.
- The following is the content of the monthly
report:
- Resaerch Question: What is the problem that you
want to solve? Why it is a problem? (For those who do not
yet really startet their thesis, It would be great to
know the general direction)
- Methodology: How do you plan to solve this
problem, which are the alternative solution paths? and
why you think you are doing it better.
- Expected results, what is the expected research
contribution
- A detailed time plan for the next 6 months, and
a comparison on what was planned and what is achieved in
the last month.
- You should also have a list of references
(Journals and conference papers) that you read this list
should be written according to the following format: [A.
El Saddik, S. Fischer, and R. Steinmetz. "Reusable
Multimedia Content in Web-based learning Systems", IEEE
Multimedia, pp. 30-38, July-September 2001.]
- I strongly suggest that you write down
paragraphs and chapters throughout your research. That
way, after the research is complete you have most of your
thesis written.
- A common problem students have is fear of
the writing phase due to this fear, they drag
out the research phase for too long.
- Also, writing helps organize your thoughts
and stimulates you to develop new idea
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Characteristics of grad students I am looking
for? |
- You
show initiative, and good research skills:
- This includes (a.o.):
- digging up material in the
library without being asked,
- formulating good research plans,
- evaluating your research well
etc
- You
are eager (not just simply willing) to perform research that fits
into my research plan
- You
show that you have your own ideas that fit in with and extend
mine
- You
show a willingness to progress rapidly in your studies
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Steps in research |
- The
early part of the research should be spent gathering information.
- You should search the literature and
- read as many papers as possibl
- make a presentation of what have you learnt so far,
what others are doing,
- A
few other points to keep in mind as you read and evaluate papers:
- Make
sure the ideas described really worked (as opposed to just
being theoretically valid, or tested on a few toy examples
- Try to
get past buzzwords:
- they
may sound good, but not mean much.
- Is
there substance and an interesting idea underneath the
jargon?
- To
really understand a paper, you have to understand:
- the
motivations for the problem posed,
- the
choices made in finding a solution,
- the
assumptions behind the solution, whether the assumptions
are realistic and whether they can be removed without
invalidating the approach,
- future directions for research, what was actually
accomplished or implemented,
- the
validity (or lack thereof) of the theoretical
justifications or empirical demonstrations, and
- the
potential for extending and scaling the algorithm
up
- Then
comes the phase where you experiment with your ideas.
- Often there will be program design and implementation
during this period of time
- In order to improve the quality (readability,
maintainability, reusability) of the software following rules
should be considered:
- The
final phase is evaluation your ideas; this will normally be
both
- theoretical and empirical (experiments or
analysis of observations).
- It is essential that you use good statistical
methods and gather sufficiently large amounts of data if you do
empirical work
- The
phases will normally iterate. so, you will continue to gather
information throughout the research.
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How to write
and how not to write technical papers |
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