Helsinki University of Technology Department for Electrical and Communications Engineering Networking Laboratory

S-38.3119: DTN Seminar: Assignments and Grading

Assignment

You will get an assignment for one reasonably well defined subject area. The assignment will be accompanied by a small pile of material (usually standards, research papers, or overview papers). You are expected to fill in gaps and answer open questions beyond the initial material within a the scope of your seminar presentation by additional literature research (we will be happy to help obtaining copies of otherwise inaccessible papers as far as possible). You are expected to provide an overview with a reasonable level of detail in a presentation of 20-25 minutes and leave room for questions. As part of this, you should briefly delineate your area from adjacent ones (if necessary) and provide an assessment of the technology presented with respect to the general topic of this seminar.

You will also take up the role of an opponent for another seminar presentation. You will receive the written summary a week before so that there is enough time for preparation.

The slides, the presentation, and the written summary must be in English.

The seminar grade will be made up of two parts: the presentation and the written summary. The weighing will be approximately 50% each but, from a practical perspective, the written summary will be used to establish a rough base grade which will then be adjusted by the impression of the presentation. Usually, the two parts are roughly in sync so that this scheme works. If the respective qualities are totally different an average will be used.

Presentation

The presentation shall provide an overview of the respective topic, position it with respect to related work in adjacent areas, and discuss its relation to the seminar subject at large. The target is to provide an introduction to somebody knowledgeable in the field of networking, stress the motivation and features of the presented technology, and discuss any issues.

As a rough guideline, the following criteria will be used to assess the quality of the presentation:

The slides should be submitted digitally in PowerPoint, PostScript, or PDF. They will be made available on the course web page after the seminar presentation.

Written Summary

The written summary is meant to enable all participants to recap the contents of each of the presentations later on. It shall be useful stand-alone, i.e. without the slides or any of primary or secondary literature used in preparation of the presentation. In essence, this means that anybody fluent in the area of networking shall be able to obtain a quick overview of the subject area just from reading the summary.

When preparing the summary please remember to not assume that the reader has read any of the background documents. For putting your summary into context, a short introduction should delineate the presented work from related areas and a conclusion should provide a brief assessment of the technology presented and, where applicable, contrast the characteristics to related areas. Please avoid figures in non-scalable formats (PNG, GIF, JPEG) as often found on the web unless really necessary. And, of course, do not forget proper citations for figures, tables, or other material borrowed from elsewhere.

The written summary should be submitted digitally as PostScript or PDF at least one week before the presentation. In particular, it needs to be available to your opponent for preparation. It will later (possibly in a revised form) be made available on the course web page. Please use IEEE Proceedings style format (two colums, point size 10 or 11).

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