Course pages 2012–13
Research Skills
All students should have a copy of the course text book, Justin Zobel's Writing for computer science (second edition). Students can borrow a copy for the duration of the course from the Computer Laboratory library (William Gates Building), on payment of a refundable deposit.
Preparatory reading is to be read before the lecture.
Exercises are due before 16:00 on the indicated days. They should be submitted to the Graduate Education Office (room FS05 in the William Gates Building).
Supplementary information and downloadable files for the exercises are online for Exercises 1-5 & 7 and for Exercise 6.
The table summarises the lecture content, preparatory reading, and exercise due dates. All the lectures will be at 14:00 in Lecture Theatres in the Wiliam Gates Building. The first lecture is in Lecture Theatre 2, all others are in Lecture Theatre 1.
There is a longer version of the timetable and assessment schedule (PDF), giving further details of the assignments, the marks for each, and the approximate amount of time you should put into each.
| Date 2012 |
Topic | Lecturer | Preparation | Related exercise |
Deadline (at 16:00) |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 Oct | Reading 1 | Dodgson | Preface & Ch 1 | 1 | |
| 2 | 8 Oct | Reading 2 | Dodgson | Ch 12 & 13 | 2 | Exercise 1 (summarise) |
| 3 | 11 Oct | Presenting 1 | Dodgson | Ch 14 | 8 | |
| 4 | 15 Oct | Writing 1 | Dodgson | Ch 2 & 3 | 3, 4, 5 | Exercise 2 (review) |
| 5 | 18 Oct | Writing 2 | Dodgson | Ch 8 | 3, 4, 5 | |
| 6 | 22 Oct | Writing 3 | Peyton-Jones | Exercise 3 (edit) | ||
| 7 | 25 Oct | Writing 4 | Dodgson | Ch 9 | 4 & 5 | |
| 8 | 29 Oct | Experiment 1 | Robinson | Ch 11 & Design | 6 | Exercise 4 (write) |
| 9 | 1 Nov | Experiment 2 | Robinson | Investigation | 6 | |
| 10 | 5 Nov | Experiment 3 | Robinson | Statistics | 6 | Exercise 5 (reduce) |
| 11 | 8 Nov | Research | Dodgson | Ch 10 | ||
| 12 | 12 Nov | Graphing 1 | Dodgson | Ch 6 | 7 | |
| 13 | 15 Nov | Graphing 2 | Dodgson | Ch 5 & 7 | 7 | |
| 14 | 19 Nov | Presenting 2 | Dodgson | 8 | Exercise 6 (analyse) | |
| 15 | 22 Nov | Presenting 3 | Dodgson | 8 | ||
| 16 | 26 Nov | Presenting 4 | Dodgson | 8 | Exercise 7 (graph) | |
| mid-2013 | Exercise 8 (present) |
Careful readers will have noticed that the preparatory reading covers all chapters of Writing for computer science other than Chapter 4 "Punctuation". While punctuation is important, it is not something on which we lecture. Students are invited to read that chapter in their own time.