Class Presentation

The purpose of your presentation is for you to become familiar with a particular topic of choice regarding embedded systems and present this topic to the class using a PowerPoint presentation. You will work with your presentation group to prepare the presentation and present this presentation together in class. It will be up to you to determine how to organize the presentation so that all group members get roughly an equal amount of presentation time.

Groups sizes will be determined after the enrollment is finalized

EDGE students may work with other EDGE students in close physical proximity, if they choose to. Otherwise, EDGE students may work alone.

Presentation details

The following is a tentative plan, but may change based on the final enrollment:

Each group will have 3 presenation days, one long and two short, of which each presentation will be on a different topic. On the long presentation day, your group will present 2 papers for the entire class period (40 minutes + 5 minutes for questions). On the short presentation day, your group will present 1 paper for half the class period (20 minutes + 5 minutes for questions). I would expect a good presentation to include enough background information (so you may need to do more background research) so that the audience can understand the purpose of the topic. You will also need to cover the details involved in each paper.

EDGE students: Even though you will not be physically in the classroom, you will be responsible for preparing your slides and submitting a taped video of your presentation. If you do not have access to video equipment, you have several choices: 1) you may Skype in using the video chat if you are available during the class period; 2) you may attend class and present in person (if you are close enough); or 3) schedule a special class session time based on your availablity. Be aware that you must still give all required presentations. If this burden is too much and you do not think you will be able to submit a video of your presentation or attend class on those days, I suggest you drop the course. I appologize but since this is a seminar course, a portion of the purpose of the course is to learn presentation skills. Also, since the process will be more difficult for you, you will only have 2 presentations: one short and one long.

You will need to select 3 topics from the topic list. There is a set amount of presentations slots for each topic so it will be on a first come first serve basis. As soon as you choose your topic and presentation day, email me and I will lock in that choice for you on the course schedule.

When you prepare your slides, make sure you include the authors names and affiliations, publications details (where and when), and number the slides in the format of X of Y where X is the current slide number and Y is the total number of slides.

After you chose your topics, you will need to find relevent papers to present on that topic. I will not choose the papers for you, but I will need to approve them. The book has many good references so you might find a topic or related papers referenced in the book. The following is a list of some of the top embedded systems conferences. You can find the websites for past offerings of these conferences and look through the conference proceedings to indentify papers of interest. If you find 1 paper that is interesting and are having trouble finding related papers on that topic, you can always look at the related work section of that paper and choose a referenced paper. Here is a list of appropriate conferences, however, some of these conferences include other topics as well as embedded systems. Try and stick within the embedded systems papers.
You may also find papers in journals, but since the computer science-based journal review process can take a long time, the papers might not be as cutting-edge as you woudl find in conferences
Google Scholar and Citeseer are also good locations to find papers.

Embedded System Topics

You will need to chose three topics from the list below. One topic will be for your short (1 paper, half class period) presentation and two topics will be for your long (2 paper, full class period) presentations. The topic numbers below match up with the topic numbers listed on the course schedule, so the topic you choose will dictate the week that you will be presenting.

Deliverables

You will need to have your papers approved at least two weeks before your presentation date. Please email me your selected papers.

On the day before your presentation, you will need to email me your slides as well as a list of possible test questions and answers. Each member of the group will need to submit questions and answers for each paper that your group is presenting. I have two reasons for these questions. The first is that it requires you to think about your papers at a different level. And second, I will draw on these questions when creating the final so keep that in mind when you create these questions. Remember, you want them to be fairly high level and not focused on details but you don't want them to be too trivial. A portion of your grade will be based on the quality of these questions.

Grading Scale

You will be graded on several criteria:

Class Participation and Online Discussions

The in class participation portion of your grade will be based on the questions you ask during class. I will keep track of the students that participate each day and this will go towards your final class presentation grade.

Since the EDGE students are unable to participate during class time and ask questions, you will be responsible for having online discussions for each presentation. This will be done on Sakai. You will have different responsibilties based on whether or not you are a presenter, non-presenter, or EDGE student. I can't give you a hard number on the number of questions you must ask in all of these areas. But I monitor the participation throughout the semester and I will give you feedback on whether or not you need more.