Readings for CS351, Spring, 2005

All members of the class (including auditors) are to read all of the assigned papers and meet in advance of the class in your groups to discuss them. The goal is that each group member should contribute her or his own insights and background knowledge to the small group discussions and hopefully clear up many confusions before we get to class. (Or at least, formulate specific questions about any confusions for the class discussion.) Topics that I would like you to cover in your groups include some subset of:

• Does everybody understand the content of the paper? If not, what issues need to be clarified to improve understanding? Does the group have the collective knowledge to answer these questions, or does it require outside input? (E.g., from me, your other classmates, etc.) Feel free to come see me in office hours or to send mail to cs351.)
• What claims do the authors make and how are those claims substantiated? Do you believe the claims (based on your experience in class, in life, etc.)? How could the authors have strengthened their claims?
• How would you extend the author's work and/or suggestions? Do you have specific counterproposals or suggestions, or would you follow up in the directions that the author has already started on? Can you suggest algorithms or techniques (whether from this class or from your other experience) that would be beneficial to the problems that the author is addressing?

Deliverables

• A summary of the content of the paper (1-2 paragraphs). Don't simply copy the abstract/summary -- formulate your own summary of the paper. This should be both a description of what questions were addressed, what methods/algorithms (if any) the author(s) used to address those questions, and the results or conclusions of the study.
• A description of how you would extend/improve this work (1-3 paragraphs). Again, please don't just take the authors' "future work" -- formulate your own thoughts about where to take this work. See the discussion points above for some starting places on this. If you disagree with the author's assessment, feel free to say so, but please offer some alternate directions for this work.

NOTE! If you would like to turn in your writeup electronically, you're welcome to do so. Please email me your summary document in either PDF, PostScript, HTML, or plain ASCII text. Please do not send me MS Word or other proprietary formats. Your submission is still due by the beginning of class (as judged by the time that it arrives in my mailbox).

Finally, I want to encourage you to have fun with these papers. Some may seem pretty dry, but they're discussing some fascinating aspects of software engineering and practical design that is highly relevant to the profession of software engineering and to society at large today. If you pay attention, you'll learn a lot about things to keep your eyes open for in The Real World (TM).

Enjoy!

The Papers

Feb 21

Berkun, S., How to build a better web browser. Web essay, Dec 2004.

Mar 23

Kohno, T., Stubblefield, A., Rubin, A. D., and Wallach, D. S., Analysis of an Electronic Voting System. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May, 2004.

(TDRL)