DAT315 The
Computer Scientist in Society
The
purposes of this exercise are to
·
Familiarize
you with researching a topic in the scientific literature,
·
Make
you an expert on one topic, which
will form the basis of later exercises.
You will
read a number of papers for this exercise, at varying levels of detail. To
prepare yourself, first find and read
S. Keshav. 2007. How
to read a paper. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 37, 3 (July 2007), 83-84
Reading this paper first will save you a great
deal of time in this exercise. A few comments in the paper are specific to networking (the author’s
own area), but most are highly relevant to reading a paper in any field.
Now, choose a paper that interests you, with >100
citations. This will be the main paper you will work with during this
course. You may wish to scan (see Keshav) several
papers before making your choice. I suggest choosing a paper that you expect to
be relevant to your own Masters’ thesis. If you have difficulty finding a
suitable paper, you can consult the lists of suggestions below.
Read your chosen
paper thoroughly, and make sure you
understand it. Expect this to take 4—5 hours (see Keshav).
Select at least one (and preferably more) older
paper from the list of references in your chosen paper, and read it (1 hour,
see Keshav). Try to choose a paper that is itself
highly cited, and which your chosen paper builds on directly.
Select at least one (and preferably more) later
paper which cites your chosen paper, and read it (1 hour, see Keshav). Try to choose a highly cited paper that builds
directly on your chosen one.
Your goal
is to understand your chosen paper thoroughly, and also to understand its
significance in a broader setting—how it relates to what came before, and what
came afterwards.
This
exercise should be done individually.
There is nothing
to be submitted for this exercise, but don’t
delay: the next exercises in the course, with tight deadlines, build
directly on this one. Don’t underestimate how long it will take you to find and select the papers you want to
read in detail; this exercise involves several days’ work, and can’t be done
the day before the deadline. Aim to complete it before the next lecture.
·
List
of the 100 most cited articles in Computer Science, according to CiteSeer in 2015. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/stats/articles
·
Wikipedia’s
list of important publications in computer science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications_in_computer_science#Programming_languages
·
Peter
Damashke’s suggested papers from 2016. http://www.cse.chalmers.se/edu/year/2016/course/DAT315/tcsis-rec.pdf
·
“Great
works in programming languages”, collected by Benjamin Pierce in 2004 (and later).
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/courses/670Fall04/GreatWorksInPL.shtml
·
The
ten most cited papers on Haskell, according to the Haskell wiki. https://wiki.haskell.org/Research_papers/Top_10