Student Conference: Submission Guidelines

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 for doing so in the Downloads section.

Please do not add an extra cover sheet. Your name, e-mail address and paper title are visible on the first page anyway.

Deliverable 4a must also be submitted as 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 describe your topic of choice. You should give a rationale for choosing this title/topic and some goals you want to achieve. The fact that YOU want to learn more about this subject is not good enough. There needs to be something more. You should also briefly describe your background/knowledge related to the topic and cite a few key references. 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 should not exceed two pages in length. There are no specific formatting guidelines.

• 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. 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.

    Please check the following links for examples on actual annotated bibliographies:
    [ An example | Example from textbook author | A really big example ]

• 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 filled 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 4a: Final paper
  This is the version of your paper that will be included into the proceedings. In the final paper all required changes from the reviewers must have been fixed. Final papers must conform to our formatting guidelines and be submitted as LaTeX source files for additional processing. Otherwise we cannot include them into the proceedings.
• Deliverable 4b: Resubmission of full paper
  In the resubmission all required changes from the reviewers must have been fixed. Otherwise the paper will 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. If your outline is available in HTML or PDF format it will be linked to 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 will 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 receive shorter timeslots.