16:198:500:01: Light Seminar

• Course number: 16:198:500:01, Index: 28629.
• Instructors: Liviu Iftode and Vinod Ganapathy
• Class hours: Tuesdays from 1:40pm - 3:00pm.
• Class location: CoRE B

The focus of this light seminar is on mobile computing performed on physically mobile, personal communication platforms, such as phones and future cars. As embedded computers and broadband connectivity are becoming ubiquituous, we are beginning to see unpredecented development of new IT technologies and applications.

In this seminar, we will try to make sense of this technology explosion from a research perspective, trying to understand these new systems, and the networking, security and social issues associated with them. In particular, we will explore topics such as mobile wireless networking, pervasive computing, vehicular computing, location-aware services, trust and privacy in mobile environments, mobile social networking and urban sensing.

We plan to cover 1-2 papers per week, depending on the number of attendees. Ocasionally, we will also have invited speakers.

Here is the reading list for this course. We will discuss one or two papers a week, roughly in the order that they appear in this list. The seminar will be informal, and grades will be based upon class participation. Please see the class schedule for the assigned readings for each week.

Each week, we will discuss one or two papers from our reading list according to the schedule below.

Here is an informal set of guidelines that you should use as you prepare to present papers in class. These guidelines may not be appropriate for all the papers that we discuss in class (especially position papers, which are speculative and propose new ideas, and may thus not contain a full-fledged experimental results section).

In each case, I've also suggested the approximate timeframe for each section of your presentation. Note that there will be questions and discussion as you present the paper, so please use the timeframe as a guideline for the number of slides that you want to prepare.

• Summarize. (15-20 minutes)
  • Problem. What problem does the paper address? Why will the world be a better place if the problem is solved?
  • Solution. What is the solution proposed by the paper? Does the solution address the problem in its entirety? If not, under what assumptions does the solution work? Are these assumptions reasonable?
  • Evaluation. What aspects of the system are evaluated in the paper? What is the experimental testbed used? What experiments were performed? Details of experimental results. What aspects of the system were not evaluated/evaluated in an unsatisfactory way?
  • Related work. What other solutions have been proposed for the problem addressed by this paper? What is unique about this paper's approach? Why does this paper's approach improve upon prior approaches?
• Critique. (10-15 minutes)
  • Pros. What did you like about the paper? Did you learn any new tricks from the paper that you can add to your toolbox?
  • Cons. What didn't you like about the paper? If you thought the problem was cool, but the solution was not, how would you have solved the problem instead? If the experimental results section was lacking, what additional experiments would you have performed instead? Why do you think the authors did not perform these experiments?
• Extend. (10-15 minutes)
  • Future work. What is the logical next step (i.e., the low-hanging fruit) in extending this paper? What about longer-term/more ambitious extensions?
  • Wild and crazy ideas. Your wacky suggestions here!