Staff

Steve Hailes	s dot hailes at cs dot ucl dot ac dot uk	7.19 MPEB
Brad Karp		7.05 MPEB
Kyle Jamieson		7.02 MPEB

Meeting Times

UCL Term 2: 12th January, 2009 - 13th February, 2009

Course Description and Detailed Course Calendar

GZ06/M038 is a graduate class in which students read and discuss 15-20 recent research papers in the area of wireless, mobile, and peer-to-peer systems. The mix of these topic areas may change from year to year. There are three chief aims in reading and discussing these papers:

Each paper appears in the calendar below on the day when it will be covered in lecture. Students must read papers before they are covered.

To motivate students to read papers before lecture, and to help students ensure they are digesting the material in the papers, most papers in the latter two-thirds of the class will be accompanied by a short question on the paper's content, posted on the class calendar below. Students are required to write and hand in a one-pager for each such question: a short, 200-500 word answer to the question. One-pagers are due at the start of the lecture when the corresponding paper is discussed. These short answers will be assessed as described further below (see "One-Pagers").

N.B. that all assigned readings (including those presented by students at the end of the course) are examinable.

Assigned Readings (to be covered in lectures and discussions)

Steve Hailes:

Brad Karp:

Kyle Jamieson:

Assessment

There are three components in the marking scheme for GZ06/M038, each of which contributes the below percentage to your final mark:

One-Pagers

To encourage students to keep up with the reading for the class, and thus ensure fruitful in-lecture discussions, we will assign one-pagers for the papers in the last two-thirds of the class. 48 hours before each lecture, we will post on the above calendar a question about the reading assigned for that lecture. Your answer should be in the form of a short essay of between 200-400 words.

You must turn in your one-pager at the start of the lecture for which a paper has been assigned.

One-pagers will be assessed on a simple scale between 0 and 2 marks:

Presentation Papers (to be presented by student groups)

N.B. that papers will be marked in red as groups claim them.

Steve Hailes:

Brad Karp:

Kyle Jamieson:

GZ06/M038 Presentation Guidelines

Groups

The final component of assessment for GZ06/M038 is a student-given presentation on a research paper. You and your fellow group members select a paper, prepare a presentation on it, and deliver the presentation.

Students choose their own groups. Once you have formed a group, please email the instructors to notify them of your group's membership and the paper you have selected. Only one group can present a paper, and they will be given to groups on a first-come, first-served basis. So it is very much in your interest to form a group and select a paper early! Once formed, all groups will be listed here.

Presentation Schedule

Each presentation will take place during a one-hour lecture slot for GZ06/M038 during the last week of the half-term (9th February, 2008 - 13th February, 2009, inclusive). Your group will have 30 minutes in which to present and 20 minutes to answer questions from students and staff. Please arrive for lecture promptly!

The presentation schedule will appear in the course calendar once groups have formed and selected papers to present.

Submission of Presentation Materials

Send a single electronic version of your slides (PDF or gzip'ed PostScript) as an email attachment no later than:

     9 AM Monday, 9th February, 2009

to all course staff:

S dot Hailes at cs dot ucl dot ac dot uk



In your presentation to the class, you must use the same slides that you submitted by email for this 9th February deadline.

Presentation Format

Most groups in recent years have used a laptop to project slides; you may also use overhead projector slides, if you so desire, and any other appropriate materials or aids.

Each group member should take a turn to speak, and all group members should speak for the same approximate duration.

Each group's presentation should include:

1. a summary of the work/experiments in the paper
2. the main conclusions drawn and why the work is important
3. a critical appraisal of the work
4. a summary and appraisal of relevant/similar work in the area

Assessment

At least two members of staff will be present for presentations. You will be assesed on [% of marks]:

1. presentation structure and delivery [10%]
2. a summary of the work in the paper and the main conclusions (a and b) [10%]
3. a critical appraisal of work in the paper (c) [15%]
4. a summary and appriasal of some relevant/similar work (d) [15%]
5. responses to questions [10%]
6. a short individual report (3 pages of A4 maximum, plus references) discussing the main issues with respect to future development and application of the particular technology/system you have presented. This should be a personal viewpoint backed-up by references to literature in support of the statements in your discussion. [40%]

The marksheet that the assessors will use for the presentations can be found here.

Note that:

• 1-5 are group activities
• 6 is an individual activity

Each student must submit his individual report by:

     Friday, 20th February, 2009

You will be required to submit the individual report both electronically and on paper; you will be sent further instructions by email concerning how and when you should do so.

Paper notes and errata

• SampleRate, p. 44, Figure 6-3 caption: the second sentence should read as follows: "Each line represents a link in the network: the rightleft graph plots links where the bit-rate with the highest throughput was the highest bit-rate with less than 50% loss, and the leftright graph plots all other links." (The remainder of the caption and the body text are correct.)
• ExOR, p. 3, Section 3.3 ("Batch Preparation"), sentence four should read as follows: "The batch map in each header indicates that the onlyonly the source..."
• Notes on "The Viterbi Algorithm" by Forney:
  • Fig. 3: the "D" blocks are delay registers, which copy their input values to their output port on every clock cycle.
  • Pay special attention to S. II. A. (convolutional codes).
  • S. II. B. and II. C. are optional reading.
  • Pay special attention to S. III.
  • Appendix is optional reading.