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