How to Write a Technical Report?

1
How to Write a Technical Report?

• Yu-Chee Tseng
• CS/NCTU

2
Structure and Format

• Authors/Affiliations
• Abstract
• Keywords
• Sections
• References

3
Abstract

• Goals
• Contributions
• Main Approaches
• something that one can remember after reading
  once

4
Section Arrangement

• Introduction
• Related Works
• Problem Definition
• Main Works (1-3 sections, such as Algorithms,
  Protocols, Maths, etc.)
• Analysis
• Experiments, Simulations, Prototyping
• Conclusions

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Introduction

• technical trends (with citations)
• applications (with citations)
• user scenarios (with citations)
• general related works (with citations)
• specific related works (with citations)
• my goal
• my achievement
• outline of this report

6
Related Works

• generally related
• specifically related
• highly related (which we will compare to)
• classification of related works

7
Problem Definition

• Statement of the problem to be solved
• Use of symbols, notations, equations are very
  important.
• Objective such as maximize/minimize something
• Evaluation metrics (such as speed, network
  throughput, power consumption, etc.)

8
Main Work

• Around 1 to 3 sections
• algorithms, protocols, etc.
• Be well-structured
• top-down
• give overall architecture
• step-by-step

9
Analysis/Simulation/etc.

• 1 to 2 sections about
• math, analytical results
• experimental results
• simulation results
• prototyping, testing results
• Comparison targets
• at least 1, but not too many

10
Conclusions

• 1 3 paragraphs
• what you have done (being proud of)
• how come it is better
• future directions

11
Bibliography

• 10 to 40 references
• be aware of the format

12
Homework 0

• ????????IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing??,
  ????????????.