- Paper 1 Sample
report
- Paper 2 Sample
report
- Paper 3 Sample
report
You are to read, understand, and critically assess the papers. Questions
you may want to ask yourself for each of the papers:
- What problem is it trying to address
- How well does it address the issue
- How does it relate to other work? Does
it reference relevant other work (as far as you can tell), does it
do the other work justice?
- How technically sound is it? Does their argumentation, the
presented data convince you? Should they have been looking at other
issues?
- How good are the results?
- How good/deep is their analysis?
- How easy would it be to reproduce their results?
- How general are their results? Can they be applied to other
systems? Did we learn some general truth?
These are only hints, I am not asking you to explicitly answer all these
for each paper. However, you may find those questions helpful in
critically analysing the papers. Imagine you are a reviewer for a
conference to which the papers have been submitted, and you are to judge
their contribution to the field.
Note that all papers are in fact published (and therefore cannot be
all that bad :-)
What to submit
You are to submit a report which summarises for each paper the basic
ideas behind their work. You are to give a critique of the technical
merits, achievements and shortcomings (if any). The papers are not
directly related, so you don't have to compare them (although feel free
to do a comparative analysis if you think it makes sense).
I am intentionally not specifying a length limit. However, I
strongly encourage you to be concise. Lengthy submissions will almost
certainly be unfocussed and waffly. I cannot imagine a decent job in
excess of 3000 words, and would imagine that a very good submission
would stay well below 2000 words total. If your report gets longer than
this you should step back and try to focus.
What I will be looking for
You will be marked on the level of understanding and critical analysis
portrayed in you submission. All relative to what can be reasonably
expected from you (I know that none of you have a PhD in OS yet :-)
Sample reports
The sample reports provided above were produced in ``real time'' by one
of the students taking the exam. They are of exceptional quality, much
better than what I hoped to get. I wish all reviewing for international
conferences was of such a standard.
Keep this in mind when reading them, and don't get discouraged by them.
Just in case you were wondering: last year's
exam was totally different.
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Last modified: 1999-11-09.