Thesis Outline
What's a thesis
A thesis is comprised of following basic parts:
Title
A good title should help your audience to know what is the
key contribution of your work.
Abstract
The abstract of a thesis presents the brief information about
the entire paper. (if should address all the contributions in a very
concise way). It may contains the following points:
(a) Problem statement, (b) About existing solutions to the
problem, and their criticism, (c) About the proposed/presented
solution, and its potential advantages, (d) Assumptions and conditions of
interest, (e) Types of analysis done, and (f) Performance and/or compexity
data.
Introduction
What is the problem you are trying to solve (written for people who
have no prior knowledge on this subject). Give the reader backround on this
topic. Include any previous work that has been done on this or very similar
topics. Be sure to cite refference's to other people's work. Then give a
brief summary of what contribution you've made to the problem and what
you've done that's new. Then give a brief introduction of what's to follow.
Hypothesis
What motivated you to take on this problem. What you believe you can
accomplish toward solving the problem (in our case we believe we can create
a laboratory for college EE students to learn how to gain experience testing
their digital designs). If you accomplish your goals how would this benefit
people?
Procedure
How you did it. How you accomplished what you promised in the
introduction. Give your approach and a detailed description of what you did
and how your results were acheived.
Remember to not only include what you did, but why you chose to do it
that way, and if you considered other methods.
Result
Present your data and draw some conclusions. Based on what you
set out to accomplish in the introduction, what did you really
accomplish. Why? Explain what could be
done (what you accomplished), what couldn't be done, and what still is
imperfect. Explain limitations of your approach, and explain what may not be
have been feasible to do with your approach. Cost and performance of
proposed approach should be explained here.
Very often, empirical data are presented here. Be sure to provide
your own observations (i.e. information) based on your data.
Future work
What could still be done in this area?
Or, your research plan.
Conclusion
Expalin in brief what you did, and analyze the results. Summarize
the paper once again, and repeat the conclusion from the results section.
Appendices
Bibliography
=============== How to write a paper that is easy to follow ============
some suggestions:
1. Organize your paper and determine the flow of your paper.
Creating an outline of your paper can help you to overview your flow.
2. Organize your paragraphs. Each paragraph should have its own
conclusion at the end. Sentences should be connected with each other.
You should avoid long sentences and paragraphs which are not easy to follow.
3. Reading someone's paper may help you in writing yours.
=========== Where to publish my paper ===========================
To publish your research, look for Call-For-Papers from Conferences
and Journals. These are the web sites may have information for
publications in our research areas:
www.usenix.com
http://www.usenix.org/events/mobisys03/
MobiSys 2003
The First Annual International Conference
on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
www.computer.org
www.ieee.org
www.acm.org