Welcome to USC CSCI597

1
Welcome to USC CSCI597!

• This course provides a series of expository
  lectures to introduce Ph.D. students to the
  breadth of research topics in CS (and, to some
  extent, beyond). The idea is to cycle through the
  subareas of USC research in CS each semester.
• First-year Ph.D. Students are required to enroll
  for 1 unit of CSCI 597 for the first 2 semesters
  of the Ph.D. Program. (Applicable only to
  students enrolling in Summer of 2000 or later.)

2
Welcome to USC CSCI597!

• Lectures M 1200-1250pm, OHE-122
• Office Hours M 2-4, HNB-30A
• Grading Must attend all lectures and complete
  all assignments with satisfactory results.
• Enrollment First-year Ph.D. Students are
  required to enroll for 1 unit of CSCI 597 for the
  first 2 semesters of the Ph.D. Program.
• Web site http//iLab.usc.edu/classes/2007cs597f/

3
More on grading / assignments

• In the first or last 5 minutes of each lecture
  short 5-minute quiz about the contents of the
  previous lecture.
• Paper will be provided, but bring a pen or
  pencil.
• Questions will be easy, but
• You must be present, and
• On time!
• Quizzes will be collected immediately at the end
  of the 5-minute period.
• There will be no opportunity for submitting late
  quizzes.

4
More on grading / assignments

• Each quiz graded on a scale
• From 0 (not turned in, no answer, all wrong
  answers, )
• To 5 (all correct answers)
• To pass you will need to get a cumulative grade
  of 3n or more, where n is the number of
  assignments handed out during the semester.

5
Our focus in this class

• We focus on USC-CS research
• Speakers will be from the department, including
  ISI and ICT
• This class complements but does not replace
  normal seminars

6
(No Transcript)
7
Ph.D. Research

• How to read papers?
• How to keep up-to-date with research?
• How to determine novelty of an idea?
• How to write papers?

8
How to read papers

• Be focused
• Use google and books extensively
• Start with reviews and book chapters, then go on
  with topical research as you are already more
  familiar with the field
• Be critical learn to identify weak papers
• Read as much as you can. You want to become the
  world expert in your research domain.

9
How to keep up-to-date with research

• Check online journals regularly
• Check online search engines regularly
• Go to conferences
• Go to USC/UCLA/Caltech/other research seminars
• Talk with people identify key researchers in
  your topic, then meet with them when they come
  over to USC for a talk
• Check conference web sites
• Check lab web sites

10
Medline / PubMed

• http//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/
• Created by NIH
• Moderated (selected journals, some degree of
  human checking)
• Mostly for the biological sciences
• Increasingly, provides links to PDF versions of
  papers in a growing subset of the journals covered

11
(No Transcript)
12
(No Transcript)
13
(No Transcript)
14
Getting the bibliography record

• Try the tools we have developed at
• http//iLab.usc.edu/bibTOhtml/
• Example
• medkey visual attention
• lists papers matching the keywords
• medref visual attention gtgt mybib.bib
• grabs the medline records, convert to bibtex,
• add to end of local bibliography file

15
(No Transcript)
16
ISI Web of Knowledge

• http//isiknowledge.com
• Wide array of journals and conference
  proceedings, broad science and engineering
  coverage
• Moderated (selected publications, some human
  intervention)
• Commercial product, USC has a campuswide
  subscription (based on matching IP address to the
  128.125.x.x)
• Search not only for papers by keywords, authors,
  etc. but also for papers that cite a given paper,
  or for papers that cite the work of a given
  author.

17
(No Transcript)
18
(No Transcript)
19
(No Transcript)
20
(No Transcript)
21
ResearchIndex

• http//researchindex.org
• Created by NEC research
• Autonomous, unmoderated, web crawler looking for
  PDFs
• Mostly about computer science and related (e.g.,
  robotics, etc.)
• Wide coverage, but only of those papers that are
  online somewhere
• Will return a variety of documents published in a
  variety of places or not published at all
  always double-check that the document you are
  interested in has some backing (e.g., is a
  preprint version of a paper published in a
  well-known journal)

22
(No Transcript)
23
(No Transcript)
24
(No Transcript)
25
(No Transcript)
26
(No Transcript)
27
USC Library online resources

• http//www.usc.edu/libraries/eresources/
• Listing and links to all journals for which USC
  has an online subscription (click on eJournals)

28
(No Transcript)
29
Google scholar

• New kid on the block
• Returns papers and links to other papers that
  cite them
• Links to other databases
• Links to the USC library system

30
(No Transcript)
31
How to determine the novelty of an idea

• Be an expert in the field
• Check with your advisor and other researchers
• Check at conferences
• Send it to a conference and gather reviews
  reactions

32
Your Ph.D. at USC

• The goal of a Ph.D.
• What it takes to achieve a great Ph.D.
• Courses
• Advisor

33
The goal of a Ph.D.

• Make a significant impact onto a specific
  research issue, such that
• nobody working on this issue can afford to ignore
  your work.
• Several components
• Need to become an expert in the field
• Develop novel ideas
• Implement them
• Thoroughly test and validate them
• Make your results known through conferences,
  informal meetings, and journal publications

34
The Questions Posed to You

• What do you want to get out of the PhD?
• a meal-ticket
• stepping-stone to industry
• a milestone in an intellectual quest
• something else?
• To what extent do you expect your thesis topic to
  result
• from your motivation or
• your supervisor's direction?
• How do you get information to inform yourself
• in your research area
• in computer science generally
• in broader intellectual topics
• in the arts and current events?
• What are you doing to educate yourself as as a
  citizen of the world, not just as a computer
  scientist?

35
How to achieve this

• Your Ph.D. is a race get started as soon as
  possible!

36
How to achieve this

• Your Ph.D. is a race get started as soon as
  possible!
• Your Ph.D. will require work of an intensity that
  you have never before encountered need to be
  strong, dedicated and focused

37
How to achieve this

• Your Ph.D. is a race get started as soon as
  possible!
• Your Ph.D. will require work of an intensity that
  you have never before encountered need to be
  strong, dedicated and focused
• Your Ph.D. will be full of ambushes, deceptions
  and problems learn to deal with them
  efficiently

38
How to achieve this

• Your Ph.D. is a race get started as soon as
  possible!
• Your Ph.D. will require work of an intensity that
  you have never before encountered need to be
  strong, dedicated and focused
• Your Ph.D. will be full of ambushes, deceptions
  and problems learn to deal with them
  efficiently
• Your Ph.D. will not necessarily succeed be very
  careful to keep it under control

39
How to achieve this

• Your Ph.D. is a race get started as soon as
  possible!
• Your Ph.D. will require work of an intensity that
  you have never before encountered need to be
  strong, dedicated and focused
• Your Ph.D. will be full of ambushes, deceptions
  and problems learn to deal with them
  efficiently
• Your Ph.D. will not necessarily succeed be very
  careful to keep it under control
• Your Ph.D. is your most important, largest-scale
  achievement not anybody elses. Hence, you must
  take control and be in charge!

40
Courses

• It is important to study hard and do very well on
  courses

41
Courses

• It is important to study hard and do very well on
  courses
• But dont overdo it! Your Ph.D. is not about
  taking courses.

42
Courses

• It is important to study hard and do very well on
  courses
• But dont overdo it! Your Ph.D. is not about
  taking courses.
• During my Ph.D. I adopted the fire-and-forget
  strategy
• Learn as much as possible
• Exploit the university and its resources to the
  maximum
• Spend a minimum amount of time on the homeworks
  be focused, efficient, do not drag it along
  forever, do not polish it

43
Screening

• 1. Course work
• Core courses
• Research courses
• Intellectual development
• Find the balance as you hit that 3.5 GPA
• Study what you need for your Ph.D.
• 2. Find a potential advisor and convince him/her
  that you canmake real progress in their research
  area.
• NOTE Several of the following slides contributed
  by Prof Michael Arbib.

44
Breadth and Depth
At the time of screening, you may only know your
general research area e.g., networking or
intelligent agents. You must chart the
territory for a definite subarea -- what are
the key issues, the best books, journals and
conferences, who are the top researchers? then
you must define your own more focused subarea in
which you will be the worlds leading
expert. Choosing a sufficiently focused area and
defining a 3-year (more or less) research
project can be time consuming and
frustrating! The right advisor should know more
about the overall territory than you do so that
s/he can be your guide. But to be a successful
student, you should eventually know morethan
your adviser about your narrow subarea!!
45
Quals

• 1. Form a 5-person Quals committee Usually 4
  from the department and one Outside Member who
  represents the Graduate School.
• 2. Write a Quals Document
• Review the relevant literature
• Define the open problems you will work on
• Report on a completed piece of the research
  (similar to a conference paper or half a
  chapter).
• Present a preliminary outline for your Ph.D.
  thesis with a tentative timeline
• 3. Defend your Proposal orally in front of the
  committee
• The aim is not to convince the committee you
  should pass but to maximize their feedback to
  focus and refine your work on your dissertation.
• 4. Form a Ph.D. committee Usually 3 to 5 members
  of your Quals committee -- but you must include
  the Outside Member.

46
Between Quals and Thesis Completion

• The thesis might take as little as one year or as
  many as four -- when doing original research you
  cannot predict what will happen
• Your predictions in the quals timeline may be
  just right, but
• Some problems may turn out to be much harder
  than predicted, while
• Others may get solved by someone else while you
  are still working on them.
• Thus the Quals Document is a general guideline,
  but may undergo constant reshaping in response
  both to your own discoveries and developments in
  the literature.
• As your work progresses see your advisor
  frequently and other committee members more or
  less occasionally to report your progress and get
  helpful feedback.

47
Skills You May Acquire Along the Way

• Presenting papers at conferences
• Preparing articles for journal publication
• Writing a patent
• Helping your advisor prepare a research proposal

48
Thesis

• The thesis is a sandwich
• Introduction and Literature Review
• 2 to 4 Research Chapters each similar in Scope
  to a Publication
• Prospects for Future Research
• Key advice
• Scope out the hot places to publish in your
  subarea.
• Then maintain 2 versions of the meat chapters
  as you write them one for the thesis and one for
  publication.
• In general your advisor will let you proceed to
  the Defense only when s/he feels that you have a
  critical mass of original research

49
Defense

• 1. Two weeks before the defense, submit a
  complete draft of the thesis to your committee
• 2. The defense will usually have 2 parts
• A 1-hour public lecture on the main points of
  your thesis
• followed by a closed door session in which you
  will be closely questioned by the committee about
  any and all aspects of the thesis.
• 3. In general, you will require a few weeks work
  to polish the thesis in a way that addresses the
  questions raised by your defense.
• 4. Both in preparing for the exam and in
  submitting the thesis, you will be responsible to
  complete all Grad School paperwork and follow all
  the guidelines.
• 5. Get a robe and mortar board and go to
  Commencement for proud photographs with your
  family, Dr. X!!

50
Finding an Advisor

• Two different strategies
• - Go where you can learn the most about what
  interests you most
• - Go where the money is

51
Your advisor

• Can help you with any issue dont be shy to
  ask!
• Generally speaking, is understanding dont
  hesitate to criticize or complain (nicely)
• Is knowledgeable please do listen and implement
  his/her advice
• Is interested only in motivated, hard-working
  students unless you are one of these, you will
  not get much attention from her/him

52
Your advisor

• is extra-busy!
• - many deadlines every day
• - many ongoing projects
• - teaching takes a lot of time
• - need to write proposals, papers, reports,
  organize committees, organize conferences,
  organize the lab, attend P.I. meetings, manage
  the lab, render various services to the
  university, do research, disseminate research
  via papers and many talks, help students write
  papers, help other students (not only from their
  own lab), lobby government agencies, babysit
  high- profile visitors, talk to the press, review
  papers, review proposals, review conference
  abstracts, etc

53
What Advisors Want

• All advisors want to advance their careers, and
  thus hope that your thesis will yield conference
  papers and journal publications that will help
  their reputation and help them get their grants
  renewed.
• Three styles
• Directed The advisor has already specified
  step-by-step what an RA has to do on one of
  their grants and if you followthese steps you
  will get a Ph.D.
• Laissez-faire Come and see me at quals and
  defense time.
• Negotiator Convince the advisor that you have
  your own goals but then negotiate a thesis topic
  that advances your goals but also allows you to
  learn from what the advisor and his/her group are
  doing and contribute to the groups progress.

54
Interacting with your advisor

• Cut on non-work-related stuff
• When meeting, be sure to provide short reminder
  of context your have one Ph.D. project but your
  advisor is working on 10 just like yours in
  parallel
• When meeting, be prepared your advisor has no
  time to waste
• If your advisor seems too busy thats probably
  because your progress has not generated enough
  excitement yet. Work harder, implement what s/he
  suggested, go beyond that, show lots of results,
  demonstrate that you are dedicating your life
  to your project.

55
Interacting with your advisor

• If possible, setup a weekly one-on-one meeting
  time.
• Take notes during the meeting
• At the end, summarize the key things you will do
  before the next meeting
• For this to work, before each meeting make sure
  that
• You have addressed the questions and pending
  issues raised during the previous meeting.
• If you believe that a raised question actually
  was not worth addressing, then be sure to explain
  why.
• This is very important because your advisor may
  envision a given step to be necessary for your
  research to go forward (e.g., run a control
  experiment, perform a given analysis, replot the
  data in a given way) as long as you dont take
  that step, your advisor will be stuck in his/her
  thinking because his/her beliefs have not changed.

56
Beyond your advisor

• A secondary goal throughout my studies was to
  maximally benefit from the incredible resources
  provided by the university.
• Identify key people and meet with them (you need
  to be prepared and have things to show them)
• Identify key labs and hang around them
• Identify key facilities and exploit them

57
Beyond your advisor

• Show your work to other professors and students
  get feedback!
• In difficult situations, most professors will
  open their door to you but you need to do the
  first step.

58
Ethical Issues

• What is plagiarism?
• Using others work and misrepresenting it as
  being your own.
• This includes
• Cut paste from the reading assigmnent
• Cut paste from the web
• Cut paste from books, other papers, etc.
• Cut paste from ANYTHING that is not your own!
• Changing wording of a sentence but keeping the
  ideas
• Summary which does not include proper references
• Etc.

59
Ethical issues

• This and the following slides are from
• http//www.usc.edu/student-affairs
  /student-conduct/ug_plag.htm
• Plagiarism is the unacknowledged and
  inappropriate use of the ideas or wording of
  another writer.
• As defined in the University Student Conduct Code
  (published in the current SCampus), plagiarism
  includes
• "The submission of material authored by another
  person but represented as the student's own work,
  whether that material is paraphrased or copied in
  verbatim or near verbatim form"
• "The submission of material subjected to
  editorial revision by another person that results
  in substantive changes in content or major
  alteration of writing style" and
• "Improper acknowledgment of sources in essays or
  papers." (11.11)

60
Example 1 Repeating Another's Words Without
Acknowledgment

• Original Source (From Neil Postman. Amusing
  Ourselves to Death. New York Penguin, 1985.
  127-128.)
• The television commercial is the most peculiar
  and pervasive form of communication to issue
  forth from the electric plug....The move away
  from the use of propositions in commercial
  advertising began at the end of the nineteenth
  century. But it was not until the 1950's that the
  television commercial made linguistic discourse
  obsolete as the basis for product decisions. By
  substituting images for claims, the pictorial
  commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of
  truth, the basis of consumer decisions.

61
Example 1 Repeating Another's Words Without
Acknowledgment

• Plagiarized Version (essentially verbatim)
• Television commercials have made language
  obsolete as a basis for making decisions about
  products. The pictorial commercial has
  substituted images for claims and thereby made
  emotional appeal, rather than tests of truth, the
  basis of consumer decisions.

62
Example 1 Repeating Another's Words Without
Acknowledgment

• Plagiarized Version (essentially verbatim)
• Television commercials have made language
  obsolete as a basis for making decisions about
  products. The pictorial commercial has
  substituted images for claims and thereby made
  emotional appeal, rather than tests of truth, the
  basis of consumer decisions.
• Although the writer has changed, rearranged, and
  deleted words in the version above, the text is
  essentially the same as the original source. In
  paraphrasing, you take the writer's ideas and put
  them in your own words. It is not a process of
  substituting synonyms or rearranging the order of
  words. Even if the version above gave credit to
  Postman for his ideas, the passage would be
  considered plagiarized.

63
Example 1 Repeating Another's Words Without
Acknowledgment

• Correctly Paraphrased and Documented Version
• Postman argues that television commercials do
  not use language or "test of truth" to help
  viewers decide whether to buy a product. Instead,
  they rely on images to create an emotional appeal
  that influences consumers' decisions (127-128).

64
Example 1 Repeating Another's Words Without
Acknowledgment

• Correctly Paraphrased and Documented Version
• Postman argues that television commercials do
  not use language or "test of truth" to help
  viewers decide whether to buy a product. Instead,
  they rely on images to create an emotional appeal
  that influences consumers' decisions (127-128).
• In the correctly paraphrased and documented
  version above, most of the ideas have been
  paraphrased or restated in the writer's own
  words. Quotation marks have been placed around a
  key phrase that is taken directly from the
  original source. In addition, the name of the
  author refers readers to a corresponding entry in
  the Works Cited page, and the page number
  indicates the location of the information in the
  source cited.

65
Example 2 Presenting Another Writer's Argument
or Point of View Without Acknowledgment

• Original Source (From Arlene Skolnick. Embattled
  Paradise. New York Basic Books, 1991. 11.)
• The changes in larger society, as well as their
  reverberations in the family, call into question
  basic assumptions about the nature of American
  society, it family arrangements, and Americans
  themselves. A "Cultural struggle" ensues as
  people debate the meaning of change. One of these
  periods of cultural upheaval occurred in the
  early decades of the nineteenth century a second
  occurred in the decades just before and after the
  turn of the twentieth century. For the last
  thirty years, we have been living through another
  such wave of social change.
• Three related structural changes seem to have set
  the current cycle of family change in motion
  first, the shift into a "postindustrial"
  information and service economy second, a
  demographic revolution that not only created mass
  longevity but reshaped the individual and family
  life course, creating life stages and
  circumstances unknown to earlier generations
  third, a process I call "psychological
  gentrification," which involves an introspective
  approach to experience, a greater sense of one's
  own individuality and subjectivity, a concern
  with self-fulfillment and self-development. This
  is the change misdiagnosed as narcissism.

66
Example 2 Presenting Another Writer's Argument
or Point of View Without Acknowledgment

• Plagiarized Version
• Three periods of cultural upheaval in the
  nineteenth and twentieth centuries have caused
  major changes in American society. The first
  occurred during the beginning of the nineteenth
  century, the second during the decades before and
  after 1900, and the third has been underway for
  the last thirty years. Three structural changes
  occurring during the current upheaval are
  primarily responsible for changes in American
  families. These include the development of a
  postindustrial information and service economy ,
  demographics changes (including longer life spans
  that have created new and different life stages),
  and an increased sense of individuality including
  a desire for self-fulfillment and self
  development.

67
Example 2 Presenting Another Writer's Argument
or Point of View Without Acknowledgment

• Plagiarized Version
• Three periods of cultural upheaval in the
  nineteenth and twentieth centuries have caused
  major changes in American society. The first
  occurred during the beginning of the nineteenth
  century, the second during the decades before and
  after 1900, and the third has been underway for
  the last thirty years. Three structural changes
  occurring during the current upheaval are
  primarily responsible for changes in American
  families. These include the development of a
  postindustrial information and service economy ,
  demographics changes (including longer life spans
  that have created new and different life stages),
  and an increased sense of individuality including
  a desire for self-fulfillment and self
  development.
• The writer of the passage above correctly
  paraphrases Skolnick's ideas but does not give
  her credit for her ideas or line of argument. The
  version on the next slide eliminates the
  plagiarism by attributing the ideas to Skolnick.

68
Example 2 Presenting Another Writer's Argument
or Point of View Without Acknowledgment

• Correctly Documented Version
• According to Skolnick, three periods of cultural
  upheaval in the nineteenth and twentieth
  centuries have caused major changes in American
  society. The first occurred during the beginning
  of the nineteenth century, the second during the
  decades before and after 1900, and the third has
  been underway for the last thirty years. Three
  structural changes occurring during the current
  upheaval are primarily responsible for changes in
  American families. These include the development
  of a postindustrial informat ion and service
  economy, demographics changes (including longer
  life spans that have created new and different
  life stages), and an increased sense of
  individuality including a desire for
  self-fulfillment and self development (11).

69
Example 2 Presenting Another Writer's Argument
or Point of View Without Acknowledgment

• Correctly Documented Version
• According to Skolnick, three periods of cultural
  upheaval in the nineteenth and twentieth
  centuries have caused major changes in American
  society. The first occurred during the beginning
  of the nineteenth century, the second during the
  decades before and after 1900, and the third has
  been underway for the last thirty years. Three
  structural changes occurring during the current
  upheaval are primarily responsible for changes in
  American families. These include the development
  of a postindustrial information and service
  economy, demographics changes (including longer
  life spans that have created new and different
  life stages), and an increased sense of
  individuality including a desire for
  self-fulfillment and self development (11).
• In the version above, a reader would be able to
  locate the source by finding the title of
  Skolnick's book in the Works Cited page and
  looking on page 11, the number indicated at the
  end of the paragraph.

70
Example 3 Repeating Another Writer's
Particularly Apt Phrase or Term Without
Acknowledgment

• Original Source (From Arlene Skolnick. Embattled
  Paradise. New York Basic Books, 1991. 11.)
• Three related structural changes seem to have
  set the current cycle of family change in motion
  first, the shift into a "postindustrial"
  information and service economy second, a
  demographic revolution that not only created mass
  longevity but reshaped the individual and family
  life course, creating life stages and
  circumstances unknown to early generations
  third, a process I call "psychological
  gentrification," which involves an introspective
  approach to experience, a greater sense of one's
  own individuality and subjectivity, a concern
  with self-fulfillment and self-development. This
  is the change misdiagnosed as narcissism.

71
Example 3 Repeating Another Writer's
Particularly Apt Phrase or Term Without
Acknowledgment

• Plagiarized Version
• The large number of "self-help" books published
  each year attest to Americans' concern with
  self-improvement and achieving more fulfilling
  lives. This process might be described as
  "psychological gentrification."
• Correctly Documented Version
• The large number of self-help books published
  each year attest to Americans' concern with
  self-improvement and their desire to have a more
  fulfilling life. Skolnick labels this process as
  "psychological gentrification" (11).

72
Example 3 Repeating Another Writer's
Particularly Apt Phrase or Term Without
Acknowledgment

• Plagiarized Version
• The large number of "self-help" books published
  each year attest to Americans' concern with
  self-improvement and achieving more fulfilling
  lives. This process might be described as
  "psychological gentrification."
• Correctly Documented Version
• The large number of self-help books published
  each year attest to Americans' concern with
  self-improvement and their desire to have a more
  fulfilling life. Skolnick labels this process as
  "psychological gentrification" (11).
• As the example above illustrates, putting
  quotation marks around a borrowed word or phrase
  is not sufficient documentation. You must also
  acknowledge the author and give the page numbers
  so a reader would be able to consult the original
  source and loc ate the word or phrase. In the
  original source, Skolnick takes credit ("a
  process I call") for coining the term
  "psychological gentrification." Quotation marks
  in the original appear to be used for emphasis.
  Phrases in quotations should be cited unless they
  have become common usage (e.g., "postindustrial"
  in the original source above).

73
Remember

• When you write a paper, youll remember all nice
  phrases you come up with. This applies to others
  too!
• Professors can feel plagiarism very easily
• Professors often conduct extensive searches to
  check for plagiarism
• Professors are likely to know or have seen the
  material you come across when writing a class
  paper
• So yes, do research and find material that can
  help you writing your essay. But do not
  plagiarize that material!

74
Regarding scientific papers

• Readers and reviewers need to know that you are
  honest and that you have a good command of the
  literature
• So plagiarism just does not make sense!
• Indeed, if you write
• Neurons in the early visual system respond to
  contrast between two regions in the visual field
  rather than to the absolute amount of light
  stimulation in a single region.
• You will make a weaker point than
• The pioneering work of Kuffler (1953) and Hubel
  Wiesel (1962) has clearly demonstrated that
  neurons in the early visual system

75
So, dont be shy about citing others!

• WEAK There has been some research about
  autonomous robots, but mostly confined to indoors
  environments.
• STRONG A recent review by DeSouza Kak (2002)
  suggests that autonomous robot research has been
  mostly confined to indoors environments.
• And remember that a lot of what you know stems
  from what you have read!
• WEAK Try to explain why previous research does
  not work, hence your new work was required.
• STRONG Show how previous research has
  established a basis for your new work.

76
For additional information

• SCampus
• http//www.usc.edu/student-affairs/student-conduct
  /
• Office for Student ConductFIG-107740-6666
• Google search for plagiarism, etc.