StudentenSeminarium 2016

Moderators: Todor Stefanov and Walter Kosters.

The seminarium is mandatory for all bachelor students that study Informatica, Informatica en Economie, Informatica en Biologie, and double bachelor Wiskunde/Informatica. It is worth 2 EC point which are part of the bachelor dossier that also consists of the bachelor project and the bachelorclass (third year).

Goal and Organization

The goal of this seminarium is to prepare students for research by means of reading, abstracting, and presenting scientific literature in the context of existing courses.

Students are given suitable scientific research papers linking a first or second year course of the bachelor program in computer science with the scientific area related to the course. Students should work in a small group (max. 2 persons) on one paper: either foundational or related to more application oriented research. They have to read and understand the paper assigned to them. In the middle of the semester, the students have to hand in a 2-page extended summary of the paper written in Dutch or English. At the end of the semester, the students have to present the paper to their peers at a student symposium.

Schedule of Activities

Feb 8, 2016:	Deadline for on-line paper bidding See section "Paper Bidding Instructions" below for instructions!
Feb 15, 2016:	Meeting for paper assignments -- Place: room 312, LIACS - Snellius building, Leiden. -- Time: 15:45 -- 17:30 The list with the final assignment of papers to students can be found HERE
Mar 21, 2016:	Deadline for handing in the extended summary of the paper See section "Extended Summary Instructions" below for instructions!
Apr 12, 2016:	Meeting for feedback on extended summaries and general guidelines for paper presentations -- Place: room 312, LIACS - Snellius building, Leiden -- Time: 15:45 -- 17:30
Apr 19, 2016:	Deadline for handing in an improved version of the extended summary of the paper See section "Extended Summary Instructions" below for instructions!
May 23, 2016:	Student Symposium The symposium will take place in Room 312 and Room 174 from 9:30 until 17:30. It will consist of 2 parallel tracks in the morning and 2 parallel tracks in the afternoon. Every student must attend the whole track in which his/her paper is scheduled for presentation. Details can be found in the symposium's program: CLICK HERE See section "Presentation Instructions" below for instructions!

Paper Bidding Instructions

In order to help the moderators with the process of assigning one paper to every group of students (max. 2 students per group), each group could bid on-line for papers that are interesting to the group. During the bidding process, a group should indicate at least 5 preferred papers. The moderators will try to assign one of the preferred papers to the group for reading and presenting. Students are encouraged to form a group and to bid in order to avoid completely random assignment of a paper to them.

The list of available papers for bidding can be found here.

All available papers can be downloaded from here.

TO START THE BIDDING CLICK HERE.

Extended Summary Instructions

After the assignment of a paper to a group of students, all students must read the paper and try to understand it as much as possible. If needed, a lecturer who is familiar with the topic of the paper can be consulted to better understand the paper. Each group must write and hand in an extended summary of the paper as follows:

The summary should be 2 pages and it should be written in Dutch or English using a specific LaTex template. To download the template in Dutch CLICK HERE; To download the template in English CLICK HERE;

The summary must be printed on paper and handed in to the moderators by March 21, 2016;

IMPORTANT NOTE: When you write the Extended Summary in English, you MUST use your own words, sentences, and story line to summarize the paper. DO NOT DO "copy-paste" of sentences, paragraphs, and story line (structure) from the paper into your summary. A summary that has "copy-paste" parts will be rejected.

The delivered extended summary will be checked and a feedback will be given to the students on how to improve the summary, if necessary. The improved summary must be handed in on paper to the moderators by April 19, 2016. The summary will be graded using the following grading system: 'unsatisfactory', 'fair', 'very good', 'excellent'. A necessary condition to pass the StudentenSeminarium is that the grade for the summary is at least 'fair'.

Presentation Instructions

All students must present the paper, they have read and summarized, by preparing and giving a research presentation at the student symposium. Some specific instructions and presentation guidelines can be found HERE . In addition, more general and maybe helpful guidelines on how to give a good research presentation can be found HERE .

For every paper, a time slot of 20 min will be allocated at the symposium: 15 min for the presentation and 5 min for questions/answers/feedback. If a paper was assigned to a group of 2 students, every student should give half of the presentation. However, every student must be prepared to give the whole presentation. Just before the presentation the moderators will decide who will give the first half and who will give the second half. Presentations are allowed to be given in English or Dutch.

Every student will be graded separately for his/her presentation using the following grading system: 'unsatisfactory', 'fair', 'very good', 'excellent'. A necessary condition to pass the StudentenSeminarium is that the grade for the presentation is at least 'fair'.