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CS697 - Spring 2021
Graduate Initiation Seminar
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General information
Instructor Name:
Email:
Office Hours:
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Adam Smith
ads22@bu.edu
On Zoom, by appointment
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Marco Gaboardi
gaboardi@bu.edu
On Zoom, by appointment
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Class Information
Overview
This required two-credit course is designed to help guide entering
Ph.D. students through the challenging transition into the graduate
program in Computer Science. As part of the responsibilities of
students and mentors engaged in research, we will cover topics that
overlap with the NSF/NIH Responsible
Conduct in Research (RCR) program.
Topics we will try to address range broadly across issues of
research and scholarship, including:
- Balancing competing demands of coursework,
research, and teaching
- How to go about identifying and working with
a dissertation advisor
- Working within a research group
- Resolving conflicts with advisor and
collaborators
- Becoming a proficient reader, writer, and
reviewer of technical papers
- Making use of online and library research
resources
- Becoming proficient with technical tools of
the trade for writing and performing research
- Presenting good talks
- Networking and becoming visible in the
research community
- Understanding the research funding landscape
- Understanding and applying scientific ethics
- Applying for fellowships and internships
- Writing a thesis proposal and a dissertation
- Finding a job after graduate school
The course will not cover details of program requirements and
milestones, nor will the class provide academic advice specific to
individual students in the class. For these please consult the
Graduate Student Handbook and your academic advisor, respectively.
Course Syllabus and Readings
+ Course Syllabus
+ Required Readings for Upcoming Class Meetings
- Announcements will be made via
email or in class about required readings. Please note that the listing
of a particular text doesn't mean that we agree with all, or
even most, of what is in it. Our goal (and hope) is that these
specific texts will stimulate discussion. Recommended references
and readings are available below.
Resources and References
The following is a comprehensive list of materials and references
that have been collected over the many iterations of this class over
the years. Feel free to suggest
others to the instructors! The required readings for each class
meeting are subsets of the references below. Further information
is also available via the RCR
website at BU.
On Being a Graduate Student
Choosing (and Managing the Relationship
with) your Advisor
Reading and
Reviewing Research Papers
Writing Research
Papers
- How to Write a Great Research Paper, (video and slides), by Simon
Peyton Jones, Microsoft Research, Cambridge
- Suggested
Guidelines for Finding "related work" for Conference Papers by Gail Kaiser
- Read
before
you cite by Mikhail
Simkin
- Guidelines
on Writing by Dave Patterson
- On
Writing CS Papers (Quiz)
by Margrit Betke
- Writing for Computer Science by Justin Zobel (Amazon's
page)
- Dietterich's rules of English (pdf version)
- Book:
(Online) Strunk, W., Elements of Style Strunk
- Tools of the trade: Latex, git, CVS, RCS, etc.
Presenting
Research Work
On Experimental design and data analysis
On Being a
Scientist
On Academic
Careers
Boston University Resources
- The BU RCR website
provides a useful list of materials for further reading. We will
use these in various case studies and discussions, especially
with respect to topics on scientific misconduct and conflict of
interest.
- The RCR Program schedule
is relevant to this course. We will pay particular attention to
Workshop 4 and related materials.
Miscellaneous