CptS/EE 562 Literature Survey Assignment
Spring, 2004
10% of final grade
Assigned:
Subject
Due:
Note: Student presentations will start March 23, and I before
spring break will ask one or two of you to present that week.
In this assignment you will apply what you have learned in
class to analyze 5-7 research papers (“primary papers”) in a related area. You will also skim 3-5 papers (“secondary
papers”) cited in these primary papers to get a better feel for the topic, and
summarize them in a paragraph or so each.
The basic idea is to analyze and summarize the state of the art in this
field.
In all places in your report, you are expected to use technical terms carefully, as discussed in class and in Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance: Concepts and Terminology. You should also be careful to have your citations in standard citation formats, and include URLS when they are available.
You will also give a presentation later in class, and it will be best to stick with the topic from your literature survey. We will discuss this later in class.
You will choose your own topic and find the appropriate papers. If the topic is too broad to be adequately covered in the paper numbers discussed above, then focus in on one aspect of it. If it is too narrow, generalize the topic.
Your report should be organized as follows:
You can cite the textbook too if it provides useful background on a specific issue, but include the section number probably to be helpful. This cannot be a primary source, and you should have at most one textbook among your secondary sources.
If you cite any web pages as the source, unless an author is listed, use the name of the organization (BBN Corp, UCSB for UC Sanata Barbara, etc), then the title of the web page, then it URL. Assume the date of publication is 2004, unless it says last updated in 2003 or something like that.
Include in the reference the URL for the paper if it is not in one of the major conferences or journals. Say “Online: URL.” where of course “URL” is the actual URL.
A sample format will be emailed to the class in .doc format at least 2 weeks before the due date.
Note that if you have the commercial version of Adobe Acrobat (not the free reader) then you can extract an image from a .pdf paper. This can be very handy for adding a figure from one of your papers (with attribution, of course). If you do not have access to Acrobat, I can arrange this in my research lab.
Grading criteria will be discussed later. We are trying to survey the state of the art,
and concentrating on papers in the last few years. Therefore, if I find a key paper in any of
the sources listed below that is in the last few years, and you did not find
it, and it is more relevant than one of the papers you chose as primary, then
your grade will suffer.
The sources below have two kinds of links: one for the conference or workshop itself (which usually contains the program, including the paper titles), and also the source for the conference papers (ACM or IEEE). Some conferences don’t have online sources (e.g., expensive publishers like Springer and Wiley), but you can almost always find the paper online with google or looking at the author’s web pages.
The WSU library has subscriptions for the online publications for the IEEE and ACM. They will not likely include most conferences and workshops in the last 6-12 months, so you will have to search for the paper like a Wiley or Springer paper.
(In general, if one cannot find a paper in their library or online, it is standard practice to email the author, and they are obliged as a matter of professional courtesy to send you an electronic or paper copy. Few authors mind this, and zero of the grad student authors! If you cannot, then the WSU library’s inter-library loan system can probably get you a copy, but I do not know how long it will take.)
We are focusing on papers published in the last 2-3 years, but if there is a need to include in your paper set a paper from as early as 1995, that is OK. Below are sources for the last 2-3 years only. Most conferences and workshops are every year at the same time each year (within a week), but some are every 18 or 24 months.
Most conferences are IEEE, and their overall paper web page is here. You can look at tables of contents, abstracts, etc but have to have the IEEE library configuration/password to access the full papers. The WSU library has a subscription to this. Also, note that the conferences often have associated one-day or half-day workshops or “Fast Abstracts” or “Works in Progress” sessions that have shorter papers online that may be of interest (but do not count as a full paper in terms of your review number of papers).
Before I go into the list, note that a HUGE source of
finding related work is CiteSeer. It probably won’t be needed for you on this
project, but it can tell you who has cited a paper, which might give you an
idea of related work.
The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), IEEE/IFIP (Note: FTCS and DCCA merged to become DSN a few years back.)
Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), IEEE
Workshop on Object-Oriented Real-Time Dependable Systems (WORDS), IEEE
International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), IEEE
International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms (Middleware), IFIP/ACM. Note this is not every year.
International Symposium on Distributed Objects & Applications
The one (brand new) journal that is appropriate is
There are really no other journals dedicated to fault tolerance, other than the IEEE Transactions on Reliability which has almost nothing to do with fault tolerant distributed systems. Further, unlike many other fields, experimental “systems software” researchers do not often bother with journal publications, because of their long lead times (1-3 years), so conferences are by far the preferred way to have “impact” with your research. To say that for experimental systems programmers journals are “almost a joke” is a bit too strong, and would offend some from other fields (or those that run the journals), so I won’t! They do have the one strong virtue of no (hard) page limitations.
Still, some top-tier journals that occasionally have fault tolerance papers in them are:
I may provide a few example paper sets the Tuesday after the midterm exam, but I might not (I have not decided yet). But part of this exercise is for you to learn how to find papers in recent research literature from a given topic in fault tolerance. So more likely I will just provide some suggested subjects, likely that Tuesday.
The best way to do this is to read through the tables of
contents in the top-tier conferences for the last 3 or so years. Then take it from there…