D-Term 2006                                            CS 4513                                         Prof. D. Finkel

 

BS/MS Assignment

 

To obtain BS / MS credit for this course, you must have filled out a BS / MS credit form (available in the CS Department Office).  You must obtain a grade of B in the course, and complete the following assignment.

 

The assignment is to write a five to ten page page on a topic related to the material of this course.  Your paper will be based on three to five papers published in the research literature, all on the same topic.  You will need to locate and select the papers to use.  You should look in journals and conference proceedings such as:

 

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems

Communications of the ACM

Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems

IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems

 

Proceedings of ACM Conferences

Proceedings of IEEE Conferences

Proceeding of Usenix Conferences

 

Please note that popular press magazines, such as Byte, PC World, PC Magazine, etc. are not acceptable sources of articles for this assignment.

 

Step 1:  Select the three to five articles to use.  Write a one-page proposal, listing the articles you will you and describing what the common topic of the papers is, and its relation to the material of the course.  The proposal must be turned in to me, by email, by Friday, April 14.  I would be happy to talk to you as you choose a topic, locate papers, and prepare the proposal

 

Step 2: Write the paper.  Be sure to provide complete bibliographic citations to your papers.  The paper should summarize the contents and main findings of the papers.  You should then compare the results of the papers – if their results disagree with each other, give an opinion about which is correct (or perhaps, in what circumstances one or the other is correct).  Alternatively, you could express and justify your opinion about which paper uses a more valuable approach, or provides more useful conclusions.  Your paper must go beyond just summarizing the contents of the papers you have read.  Again, I will be happy to discuss your paper with you as you prepare it.

 

The paper is due to me, via email, by the last day of D-Term, May 2.