Com S 541: Programming Languages

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Got a question or comment? Contact us at (515) 294-6168 or hridesh@cs.iastate.edu.

Project Idea: On or before Sep 4, 2008 at 11:59pm CST

Submission Instructions: Project ideas must be submitted via e-mail to hridesh@cs.iastate.edu. If you click the link above the subject will be filled automatically, otherwise please ensure that your subject is exactly "[Fall-08-541-Project-Idea]" (without the quotes). Please download the template for project report from here and modify the abstract.tex file to contain the description of your idea. Please attach the abstract.tex with your submission e-mail.

Keywords: Along with the project idea, please also include a list of 4-6 relevant keywords that pertain to your topic in the submission e-mail.

How to write your submission?

Phil Koopman's Checklist for parts of an abstract should serve as a guide for you to write your idea. I am reproducing it verbatim here for your convenience.

"Despite the fact that an abstract is quite brief, it must do almost as much work as the multi-page paper that follows it. In a [..] paper, this means that it should in most cases include the following sections. Each section is typically a single sentence, although there is room for creativity. In particular, the parts may be merged or spread among a set of sentences. Use the following as a checklist for your next abstract:

• Motivation: Why do we care about the problem and the results? If the problem isn't obviously "interesting" it might be better to put motivation first; but if your work is incremental progress on a problem that is widely recognized as important, then it is probably better to put the problem statement first to indicate which piece of the larger problem you are breaking off to work on. This section should include the importance of your work, the difficulty of the area, and the impact it might have if successful.
• Problem statement: What problem are you trying to solve? What is the scope of your work (a generalized approach, or for a specific situation)? Be careful not to use too much jargon. In some cases it is appropriate to put the problem statement before the motivation, but usually this only works if most readers already understand why the problem is important.
• Approach: How did you go about solving or making progress on the problem? Did you use simulation, analytic models, prototype construction, or analysis of field data for an actual product? What was the extent of your work (did you look at one application program or a hundred programs in twenty different programming languages?) What important variables did you control, ignore, or measure?
• Results: What's the answer? Specifically, most good [..] papers conclude that something is so many percent faster, cheaper, smaller, or otherwise better than something else. Put the result there, in numbers. Avoid vague, hand-waving results such as "very", "small", or "significant." If you must be vague, you are only given license to do so when you can talk about orders-of-magnitude improvement. There is a tension here in that you should not provide numbers that can be easily misinterpreted, but on the other hand you don't have room for all the caveats.
• Conclusions: What are the implications of your answer? Is it going to change the world (unlikely), be a significant "win", be a nice hack, or simply serve as a road sign indicating that this path is a waste of time (all of the previous results are useful). Are your results general, potentially generalizable, or specific to a particular case? " [Koopman]