Student Conference: Submission Guidelines, fall 2013

Introduction

All deliverables, except deliverable 1, must be prepared with the LaTeX typesetting system. All deliverables, except deliverable 1, must furthermore follow certain formatting guidelines. To make this task easier, we provide templates and examples so in the Downloads section.

Please do not add an extra cover sheet to your submission, if your name, e-mail address and paper title are shown clearly on the first page (for deliverables 2-4 this is guaranteed by using the templates).

For deliverable 4a you must also submitted all LaTeX source file(s). It is the responsibility of the author to make sure that all documents and necessary files are accessible and readable using common hard- and software.

All work you produce during this course (intermediate results as well as deliverables) will be checked with respect to plagiarism. Make sure you understand what plagiarism is and how you can avoid it.

Guidelines for each type of submission

• Deliverable 1: Topic selection
  In this document you propose a title for your paper and formulate a clear and specific research question, statement or hypothesis. You should also briefly explain the relevance of this question, statement or hypothesis; why would anyone be interested in reading your paper? Make sure there is something meaningful to say about your topic. The fact that YOU want to learn more about this subject is not good enough. There needs to be something more. To be able to write something meaningful you should choose a familiar area. Trying to delve into a completely new subject area will likely fail. You should therefore also briefly describe your background/ knowledge related to the topic and cite at least one key references (better two or three).

  By reviewing the topic selections we want to make sure that students chose manageable topics and have the required background to write a non-trivial paper.

  Deliverable 1 will usually be up to one page of text. It must not exceed two pages in length. There are no specific formatting guidelines (but make sure your name, e-mail address and the title of the paper are clearly visible on the front page).

• Deliverable 2: Outline + annotated bibliography
  In the Downloads section, we provide a LaTeX example for deliverable 2 that can be used as a template for your submission.
  • Paper outline
    An outline is a draft of a research paper. The outline should be detailed enough to understand what you have planned to write in your final paper. The main sections and subsections should be drafted and contain some information about the planned contents. Please check the lecture overheads and the formatting guidelines for details.

    The outline should be about 2-3 pages in length (~1000 words). Formatting MUST follow our formatting guidelines.

  • Annotated bibliography
    An annotated bibliography is a list of literature references where each reference is followed by a section (the "annotations") summarising/commenting/discussing the referenced material in YOUR words. The annotations should give the reader a flavour of the referenced material and help the writer organise his/her materials.

    Please check the lecture overheads in the Downloads section for details and examples.

    The size for an annotated bibliography can vary very much depending on the number of references and the lengths of your annotations. Among your references, we expect at least 5 annotated references of journal and conference articles. A reasonable size for a single annotation is about 50-250 words.
    Please note that annotations and abstracts are quite different things. Just copying or paraphrasing the abstract is therefore not very helpful.

• Deliverable 3: Full paper
  This is the actual research paper that will be graded. Each paper will be reviewed thoroughly by at least two reviewers with respect to our evaluation criteria. The full paper must conform to Springer's formatting guidelines for the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Information and links about the LNCS format are provided in the Downloads section.

  The full paper should be about 10-12 pages in length. Papers should not be shorter than 8 pages and must not exceed 15 pages in length.

  Each reviewer will fill in a Review Form with comments and feedback on your paper, including a list of required changes for acceptance in the next step (deliverable 4a/b).

  If accepted, a revised version of your full paper will be included into the proceedings (deliverable 4a). Otherwise you can resubmit a revised version of your full paper for a second review (deliverable 4b).

• Deliverable 4: Final paper (4a) or Resubmission (4b)
  In deliverable 4 all required changes from the reviewers must have been fixed. The submission of deliverable 4 must therefore be accompanied by a separate document briefly describing all changes. If there are any required changes that were not implemented, you must present convincing reasons for not doing so.

  Deliverable 4 must conform to the same formatting guidelines as the full paper.

  • Deliverable 4a: Final paper
    This is the version of your paper that will be included into the proceedings. Make sure to submit all source files needed for proper LaTeX processing. Otherwise we cannot include your paper into the proceedings.

  • Deliverable 4b: Resubmission of full paper
    This version will be reviewed again. If the required changes from the reviewers are not implemented properly, the paper might be rejected again and you will fail the course.

For more detailed advice on technical writing attend the lectures and check out the resources in Resources section.

Authors of accepted full papers will be notified by e-mail. All accepted contributions will be made available in the Advance Program.

Authors of accepted full papers are expected to adjust their submission according to the comments of the reviewers and submit a final paper to the Program Committee. The final versions of all accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings. The proceedings of the conference will be published as a Technical Report of the Department Computing Science and made available for all participants at the conference.

All authors of accepted full papers are expected to give an oral talk at the conference. Depending on the number of participants, we might have different kinds of talks. The best papers will receive 30 minutes of time (max. 25 minutes talk + 5 minutes discussion). The remaining papers will usually receive shorter timeslots.