[A4] Research Proposal (Revision)

Improve Your Manuscript

Revisit your research proposal with the mindset of a programmer analyzing code. In this assignment, you (critically) refine and improve your research proposal by applying principles of “program analysis and synthesis”, with a focus on clarity, precision, and brevity.

• Fix any spelling or grammatical issues.
• Improve the organization of your text, e.g., make topic sentences clearly conclude a paragraph.
• Against Vagueness: Challenge yourself to identify any vague statements in your proposal. Rewrite your “statements” to be as specific and clear as possible, and avoid programming errors like use-without-definition.
• Against Verbosity: Apply the principle of minimization to your writing. Eliminate redundant phrases, and any statement that does not add value to your proposal.

You may ask a peer to proof-read your research proposal. After revision, your proposal should look like a serious research paper. Specifically, you should take good care of different type of readers:

• Junior-year undergraduates. They have some (but limited) background in programming, algorithms, and computer systems. You should try to convince them that you are trying to solve a really interesting problem with really exciting techniques.
• Graduates, but from other areas in computer science. They can have their independent judgment of the quality of your research work.
• Expert, but from other areas in computer science. They read a lot of papers. You should quickly impress them with your good work.
• Your domain experts, maybe the author of a paper you cited. They are likely the most weighted reviewers in the program committee to decide whether your paper should be thrown away. They will have a quick and precise judgment of your research contributions. So don't irritate them!

Try to make your article readable to all the above audiences. Don't worry about writing too much background-Your domain experts will skim your topic sentences and directly jump to your point. See the power of topic sentences!

Useful reference materials:

• Writing Tips and Style Guidelines (see the “general grammar” and “technical writing” parts)
• The Elements of Style and The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS)

Policy on using large language models:

• Permitted: You can ask a large language model to revise your manuscript to improve clarity, correct grammatical errors, etc. It is also encouraged to ask from large language models why they are making specific changes.
• Not Permitted: You cannot ask a large language model to generate chunks of content based on a few rough ideas. This will generally result in a verbose paper.

Typeset with TeX

Use the following document configurations:

\documentclass[acmsmall,screen,anonymous]{acmart}
\acmConference[Introduction to SE Research]{The 2024 Introduction to Software Engineering Research at Nanjing University (ISER'24)}{2024}{Nanjing, China}
\setcopyright{none}

Reference format: \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}.

Important note: you should put your name and affiliation (English) in the \author{} block. The instructors will keep a printed proceeding (for the non-anonymous version). Other instructions follow the same of the previous assignment: all proposals must not exceed six pages (single-column) for the main text (including figures, tables, and appendices). Additional pages containing only references are allowed.

Typeset a Beautiful Paper

Try your test to create a beautiful paper. Please refer to the texdoc of acmart (texdoc acmart in command line). Here is a link to common LaTeX issues. You may also find beautiful papers in POPL/PLDI/OOPSLA/ECOOP. Another source to learn typesetting is from preprint sources on arXiv.

Submission Guidelines

• Submit a zip-format archive of source code. The document root should be named main.tex (any directory will be okay; but should only have one main.tex).
• Build command: latexmk -pdf main.tex.

Before you submit your manuscript, ensure that it can be compiled successfully by testing it with our online submission system. Please follow these steps:

• Create a zip archive containing all the necessary files for compilation.
• Use the following curl command to upload your zip file to our server (replace the <stuid> with your student ID and <your-zip-file> with the path to your zip archive).

  curl http://172.27.157.158:5000/submit -F stuid=<stuid> -F "file=@<your-zip-file>" --output result.zip
  

• After the upload is complete, you will receive a result.zip file. This archive will contain two versions of your manuscript in PDF format: one anonymous and one non-anonymous.
• Verify that your name is correctly displayed in the non-anonymous PDF.

If you encounter any issues or have questions regarding the submission process, please contact the teaching assistant.