[A4] Research Proposal (Revision)

⚠️Submission Deadline

CST 23:59:59 Dec 22, 2024. The deadline is firm. (Please follow the submission instructions.) You have got plenty of time. Make sure to ask your advisor for revision comments.

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:

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.