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.

In this course, you will be required to create a presentation group. Groups must consist of exactly 2 students, with one group of 3 or a single student working alone if course enrollment is odd (the first request I get will be the only one considered, but will only be approved after the add/drop deadline of Jan 11 @ 11:59pm). Please stay after class the first and second days to form your groups. You must submit your group requests to me via email by Sun Jan 13 @ 8 pm.

Presentation details

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

Each group will have 2 presenation days, of which each presentation will be on a different topic. For each presentaiton day, your group will present 2 papers for the entire class period (35-40 minutes + 5-10 minutes for questions). The two papers must be logically related. 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.

You will need to select 2 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. You must submit your topic choices with your group member requests to me via email by Sun Jan 13 @ 8pm. Presentations will begin on Thursday Jan 24. The order in which the topics are listed below represents the order in which you will present. Therefore, if you chose topic 1, you may present on Jan 24. There are 9 topics and roughly 12 presentation weeks, so there is no definite mapping of topic to week yet, since midterms will be added to the schedule as well. But you can get an idea of the basic timing of your talk with repect to the course progression.

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.

No research is ever complete, nor is any research flawless. Therefore, the last slide of your presentation MUST identify questions, shortfalls, and or disadvantages of the papers' works.

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 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. When you submit your papers, you must also give a short explanation of how the papers are related and give the complete paper citations. Please attach the PDF of the papers to the email.

CASES - International Conference on Compilers, Architecture, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems
CODES+ISSS - International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis
ISLPED - International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design
SOCC - International SOC Conference
LCTES - Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems
DAC - Design Automation Conference
FCCM - IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines
DATE - Design, Automation and Test in Europe
ICCAD - International Conference on Computer-Aided Design
FPL - Field Programmable Logic and Applications
HPCA - High-Performance Computer Architecture
MICRO- IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Microprogramming & Microarchitecture

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 would find in conferences

TVLSI - IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems
TCAD - IEEE Transactions on COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN of Integrated Circuits and Systems
IEEE Transactions on Computers
ACM Transactions on Computers
TACO - ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization
DAES - Design Automation for Embedded Systems
Pretty much any ACM/IEEE Journal is a good journal to look at.

Google Scholar and Citeseer are also good locations to find papers.

Embedded System Topics

You will need to chose two topics from the list below.

Topic 1 - Sensor Networks
Topic 2 - Communications
Topic 3 - Aero-space Applications
Topic 4 - Real-time Systems
Topic 5 - Reconfiguable Computing
Topic 6 - Hardware-Software Partitioning and Co-Design Principles
Topic 7 - Memory/Cache Optimization Techniques
Topic 8 - General Low Power/Energy Optimization Techniques
Topic 9 - Architectural Optimzations

Deliverables

You will need to have your papers approved at least two weeks before your presentation date. Please email me your selected papers. I will not be reminding you, so make sure you keep track of the timing. Since the first groups will present on Jan 24, those groups may submit their paper selections by Tues Jan 15.

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, a minimum of 4 per paper. 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 midterms 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 and how well they are covered in your presentation

Grading Scale

You will be graded on several criteria:

Timing - Starting and ending at the proper times
Preparation - Slides being in a presentable, understandable format
Submissions - Submitting the papers, slides. and questions on time
Clarity of your presentation
Ability to answer questions from the audience
Identifcation of questions/shortfalls/disadvantages/future directions

Class Participation

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. I can't give you a hard number on the number of questions you must ask, but I monitor the participation throughout the semester and I will give you feedback on whether or not you need more. In the past, to attain 100% of the presentaton points, you must have participated on 90% of the days.