Opportunities 4 students

MCRLab slides template can be found under MCRLab_Slides_2020. (All MCRLab students are required to use this template)

Submission of Final version of the Thesis
Here is information regarding UO Research guidelines on the electronic submission of the thesis:

Support for Students

If you are a new/prospective student interested in working with me on a research project please read the following carefully. Due to the large volume of email I receive from prospective students, I don’t have time to respond to most email individually. Thus if you send me unsolicited email with questions that are answered below, I will not reply.

  1. If you are considering University of Ottawa graduate program as a MSc or PhD student in either Computer Science or Electrical and Computer Engineering, I encourage you to apply. However I don’t make admission decisions. They are made by the admissions committee. Please apply directly to the university and the department. Please don’t contact me directly about admissions questions. I will ignore all such emails.
  2. If you are a prospective graduate student and you have some prior background in Multimedia Communications, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Web technologies and/or Sensors/Actuators(courses, projects etc.) then send me a brief email about yourself, your research interests and so on.
  3. If you have indicated clearly in your Statement of Purpose that you want to work in Multimedia Communications, then I probably already know who you are. I will contact you directly if I am interested in offering you a position in my group.
  4. Support is always subject to the availability of funds, and you must realize that the grants I receive are subject to renewal and can be cut
  5. If you have a scholarship, mention the source clearly in your letter.
Goals
  • My goal, as a professor, is to ensure that you, as a student have the highest possible quality education:
    • An environment for the student that is conducive to research and in which the student can grow intellectually will be provided;
    • We will establish a realistic timetable for completion of various phases of the project;
    • I consider every graduate student as a “junior colleague in research”;
  • Your goal, as a student should be to strive for excellence in research, therefore you:
    • Maintain open communication with me concerning any problem, either real or perceived;
    • A thesis (especially a Ph.D.) should not only contain a word-description of some new ideas or services but also a complete specification of these ideas in a formalism, such as a protocol or language. Implementation and Performance analysis then should be done.
    • A master thesis could be a tool or an application that proof a new concept. Anyway, here also Implementation and Performance analysis should be done. Some Master theses however require a deep theoretical analysis and need then to discuss almost all available related work and to analyze the differences between the new model and the already existing ones.
    • Scalability issues are key and should be studied analytically by simulation, or real experiments. In any case, (the issue that makes me very very very upset) is PLAGIARISM. It must be avoided by all means. To exactly understand the concept of PLAGIARISM and how to avoid it, please refer again
      to: http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~elsaddik/abedweb/teaching/plagiarism.pdf
    • More over Master thesis can not be submitted and defended before the student write one good conference paper or – at least – shows an attempt to write one, while a Ph.D. thesis requires at least three journals and several conference publications.
    • Last but not least, I need a progress report every month (30th of the month). I need to discuss your progress and ideas at least once a month personally with you.
    • The following is the content of the monthly report:

        1. Research Question: What is the problem that you want to solve? Why it is a problem? (For those who do not yet really started their thesis, It would be great to now the general direction)
        2. Methodology: How do you plan to solve this problem, which are the alternative solution paths? and why you think you are doing it better.
        3. Expected results, what is the expected research contribution
        4. A detailed time plan for the next 6 months, and a comparison on what was planned and what is achieved in the last month.
        5. You should also have a list of references (Journals and conference papers) that you read. The list should be written according to the following format: [A. El Saddik, S. Fischer, and R. Steinmetz. “Reusable Multimedia Content in Web-based learning Systems”, IEEE Multimedia, pp. 30-38, July-September 2001.]
        6. I strongly suggest that you write down paragraphs and chapters throughout your research. That way, after the research is complete you have most of your thesis written.
          • A common problem students have is fear of the writing phase — due to this fear, they drag out the research phase for too long.
          • Also, writing helps organize your thoughts and stimulates you to develop new idea
Characteristics of grad students I am looking for?
  • You show initiative, and good research skills:
    • This includes (a.o.):
      • digging up material in the library without being asked,
      • formulating good research plans,
      • evaluating your research well, etc.
  • You are eager (not just simply willing) to perform research that fits into my research plan
  • You show that you have your own ideas that fit in with and extend mine
  • You show a willingness to progress rapidly in your studies
Steps in research
  • The early part of the research should be spent gathering information.

    • You should search the literature
    • read as many papers as possible
    • make a presentation of what have you learnt so far, what others are doing,
  • A few other points to keep in mind as you read and evaluate papers:

    • Make sure the ideas described really worked (as opposed to just being theoretically valid, or tested on a few toy examples
    • Try to get past buzzwords:
      • they may sound good, but not mean much.
      • Is there substance and an interesting idea underneath the jargon?
    • To really understand a paper, you have to understand:
      • the motivations for the problem posed,
      • the choices made in finding a solution,
      • the assumptions behind the solution, whether the assumptions are realistic and whether they can be removed without invalidating the approach,
      • future directions for research, what was actually accomplished or implemented,
      • the validity (or lack thereof) of the theoretical justifications or empirical demonstrations, and
      • the potential for extending and scaling the algorithm up
  • Then comes the phase where you experiment with your ideas:
    • Often there will be program design and implementation during this period of time
    • In order to improve the quality, i.e., readability, maintainability, and reusability, the software engineering approaches should be followed
  • The final phase is evaluation your ideas; this will normally be both
    • theoretical and empirical (experiments or analysis of observations).
    • It is essential that you use good statistical methods and gather sufficiently large amounts of data if you do empirical work
  • The phases will normally iterate. so, you will continue to gather information throughout the research.
How to write and how not to write technical papers