Department of Computer Science and Technology

Technical reports

Submitting a dissertation as a technical report

Contents

CST Part II project dissertation

If a student wants to submit their CST Part II project dissertation as a departmental technical report, some additional considerations apply, beyond the normal tech-report submission requirements:

  • The tech-report submission needs to be approved by a current University Teaching Officer (UTO) at the department. For a Part II dissertation this would normally be the supervising UTO of the project, who is one of the two assessors of the dissertation.
  • There is an expectation that only very strong dissertations are considered for submission, and in particular that they satisfy the criterion of “Contribution to the field, with genuine potential for impact outside the tripos” in the “Implementation and Contribution” section of the the marking guidelines.
  • The submission should happen after the dissertation has been marked and the marks have been moderated between the assessors, approved by the Examiners, and released on CamSIS. (The tech-report series editor does not want to prejudge the outcome of the assessment.)
  • Part II dissertations have a prescribed structure that differs somewhat from typical scientific reports. In particular, Chapter 2 (Preparation) often contains various project-management information, which will be of great interest to Part II project assessors to help them understand the project in the context of the student’s studies, but which will be of much less interest to external readers. Some editing will likely be required to make the dissertation read more like a normal scientific report, to remove terminology specific to the Computer Science Tripos, such as references to the project proposal, success criteria, project extensions, project timetable, term names, starting points, related courses, declaration, etc. Your UTO supervisor can provide more detailed advice.
  • Your dissertation and tech-report are independent documents. There will be an indication on page 2 saying “This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted May 20XX by the [first] author for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Computer Science Tripos) to the University of Cambridge, Y College”, but you are welcome to make significant edits relative to your dissertation, e.g. to remove project-management information specific to Part II projects, or to incorporate examiner feedback or newer results.
  • Your approving UTO should reread your draft technical report very carefully before submission, this time as a scientifc report instead of as a Part II project dissertation.
  • Technical reports based on a dissertation are normally single-author documents, but in exceptional circumstances authors can add coauthors (e.g., if a significant contribution by a supervisor was included).
  • Part II dissertations are submitted to the examiners with a repository archive, whereas a technical report is currently just a PDF, without supplementary source-code or data files. Therefore, if you refer to any repository in your submission, please find a suitable place to host it publicly (e.g., GitHub, Zenodo, departmental research group web pages, etc.) and include the URL to that in your PDF before submitting it as a tech-report.

CST Part III or MPhil ACS dissertation

If a student wants to submit their CST Part III or MPhil ACS dissertation as a departmental technical report, some additional considerations apply, beyond the normal tech-report submission requirements:

  • The tech-report submission needs to be approved by a current University Teaching Officer (UTO) at the department. For a Masters dissertation this would normally be the supervising UTO of the project, who is one of the two assessors of the dissertation.
  • There is an expectation that only very strong dissertations are considered for submission, and in particular that they satisfy the criterion of “Significant contribution to the field” in the the Part III and ACS project-report-marking guidelines.
  • The submission should happen after the dissertation has been marked and the marks have been moderated between the assessors, approved by the Examiners, and released on CamSIS. (The tech-report series editor does not want to prejudge the outcome of the assessment.)
  • Masters dissertations have a less prescribed structure than Part II dissertations and can often be written such they can be submitted directly as a technical report, or with minimal editing. You ought to remove prescribed front-matter items, such as declarations and word counts, and possibly also references to project-management details, such as the project proposal. Your UTO supervisor can provide more detailed advice.
  • The Masters project report template keeps the proscribed word count and declaration on page 2, such that they disappear if pages 1+2 are replaced with the standard tech-report cover pages. This way the page numbers can remain the same in your dissertation and your tech-report version. (The tech-report editor can easily remove the first two pages for you from your submitted PDF.)
  • Your dissertation and tech-report are independent documents. There will be an indication on page 2 saying “This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted June 20XX by the [first] author for the degree of Master of Engineering (Computer Science Tripos) to the University of Cambridge, Y College” [or “Master of Philosophy (Advanced Computer Science)” for ACS], but you are welcome to make significant edits relative to your dissertation, e.g. to incorporate examiner feedback or newer results.
  • Technical reports based on a dissertation are normally single-author documents, but in exceptional circumstances authors can add coauthors (e.g., if a significant contribution by a supervisor was included).
  • Part III / MPhil ACS dissertations can be submitted to the examiners together with a repository archive, whereas a technical report is currently just a PDF, without supplementary source-code or data files. Therefore, if you refer to any repository in your submission, please find a suitable place to host it publicly (e.g., GitHub, Zenodo, departmental research group web pages, etc.) and include the URL to that in your PDF before submitting it as a tech-report.

PhD thesis

We used to encourage all PhDs to be submitted as a departmental technical report. However, since October 2017, the University has been publishing an electronic copy of all PhD theses on the Apollo repository in the Theses – Computer Science and Technology collection. Therefore, there is no longer any benefit from also publishing the exact same document as a technical report, as that would just create two URLs and two DOIs for essentially the same document.

However, we still happily accept PhD theses as technical reports, especially if an author wants to publish an edited or updated variant of their examines thesis that is not exactly the version approved by the Degree Committee already deposited on Apollo. Examples of such post-examination edits may be to incorporate newer results or newer references, or to incorporate more substantial optional feedback from the examiners that were not required for version approved by the Degree Committee.

Some related hints and guidance:

  • Please wait with submitting your PhD thesis as a technical report until it has been approved by the Degree Committee and appears in the List of finished PhDs.
  • There is some guidance on the PhD thesis formatting page on how to structure the front matter of the thesis document such that it could be turned into a tech-report submission by merely removing pages 1+2 (which the tech-report editor can easily do you you).

See also