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Infotech Oulu Graduate School

The University of Oulu, Department of Electrical and Information Engineering and Infotech Oulu Graduate School will organize a postgraduate course on

How to Get a Ph.D.: Methods and Practical Hints (2005-2006)

The course of 4 credit units consists of (1) compulsory lectures with slides in English, (2) a written exam of the course material, and (3) a course work. The grades of the course are 1-5. The course can be participated by only those who have an official supervisor for postgraduate studies at the university. The course is most useful for those active students who have already a rough idea on the possible topic of their doctoral thesis, or alternatively that of their licentiate thesis. Without a topic it is difficult to pass the course.

Important dates

Registration (Anna-Liisa.Ratilainen(at)vtt.fi) to the course is due to 12.9.2005 (tell your department, supervisor, advisor, and employer when you register).
Registration to the exam (Anna-Liisa.Ratilainen(at)vtt.fi) is due to 9.11.2005 at noon (tell which textbook you have selected, Davis or Bock, when you register).
Exam will be on 11.11.2005.
Submission of course work proposal (Anna-Liisa.Ratilainen(at)vtt.fi) is due to 24.11.2005.
Decision on the course work requirements will be given on 22.12.2005.
Registration to the second exam (Anna-Liisa.Ratilainen(at)vtt.fi) is due to 18.1.2008 at noon (tell which textbook you have selected, Davis or Bock, when you register). Anna-Liisa Ratilainen will forward the registrations to the university.
The second exam will be on 20.1.2006.
Submission of final course work (Anna-Liisa.Ratilainen(at)vtt.fi) is due to 30.4.2006.
Final results will be published on 31.5.2006.

More information about the course will be given by Prof. Aarne Mämmelä (Aarne.Mammela(at)vtt.fi), who is the course organizer, Prof. Tapio Seppänen (Tapio.Seppanen(at)ee.oulu.fi), and Prof. Olli Silvén (Olli.Silven(at)ee.oulu.fi).

General contents

We will have altogether five lecture sessions (see below) of which four are compulsory. There will be several invited lecturers who will talk about the character of researchers and their exciting task, starting from the definition of the problem and hypotheses, literature review, experiments and their analysis and discussion and the publication, which is the definitive output of successful research. The examples will be taken from engineering and science. Additional material will be also distributed on this page.

The exam will be based on the lectures and one of the two course books (in English). The lectures will ease the making of the course work. It will be adapted to the experience of the student and the course work will be closely related to the students’ everyday work, which they should do anyway, but now it will be done in a systematic way even with extra credit units. The course will support postgraduate students in their hard but rewarding work towards the Ph.D. degree.

Program

All the lectures will be in IT 115 in Tietotalo 2 near the entrance M (see www.oulu.fi/kartat/linnanmaa.pdf and www.tol.oulu.fi/tietotalo/tt2-3d-pohja-a4.pdf). The lecture material will be available on this page. Note. On 4.10.2005 there will be no lecture.

Exam

The exam will be at the university (usually room L1) jointly will the other exams of the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering. You should register to the exam according to the department practices to Anna-Liisa Ratilainen (Anna-Liisa.Ratilainen(at)vtt.fi) 48 hours before the exam (if there is a weekend in between, add additional 48 hours). For the details of registration, see http://www.ee.oulu.fi/opiskelu/. In each exam there will be four questions. Two of the questions will be from the lectures. The rest of the questions will be from the textbook. The student may select the textbook from one of the two available books.

The first exam will be on Friday, 11 November 2005. Two additional exams will be organized if necessary during the spring. Only those students that have passed the exam are allowed to prepare the course work, but all can submit a proposal. The exam requirements include the lectures and the selected course book.

Course books

Select one of the two alternatives and tell it (Davis or Bock) when you register to the exam (see above). For more information about the books, see for example Amazon, www.amazon.com.

1. M. Davis, Scientific Papers and Presentations, 2nd ed. Academic Press – Elsevier Science, 2005, xix + 356 pp., ISBN 0-12-088424-0

(This book might be more interesting for students who are just starting their career. The book emphasizes a very important part of research work, namely written and oral communication. In addition to details of writing a paper, there are chapters on searching literature, research proposal, doctoral thesis, review process, oral and poster presentations, group communications, communicating with other audiences, and advices to an international student. In the appendices there are an annotated bibliography and several practical examples. The author is a research associate professor of communications at the University of Arkansas, see http://www.uark.edu/depts/agronomy/facpage/davis/davis.html. The first edition of the book can also be used.)

2. P. Bock, Getting It Right: R&D Methods for Science and Engineering. Academic Press, 2001, xviii + 406 pp., ISBN 0-12-108852-9

(This book might be more interesting for students who have already some experience on research, covering research methods in science and engineering. The book includes the most important information about written and oral communications. In addition there are details on research and development, project organization, knowledge representation, and scientific method including its history. In the appendices there are a bibliography and summaries of the practical hints given by the author. He is a professor of machine intelligence and cognition at the George Washington University, see http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~pbock/.)

Editorial board

The proposals and the final reports will be reviewed by an editorial board, which consists of Prof. Aarne Mämmelä as the chairman and Prof. Heikki Ailisto (VTT), Senior Research Scientist Tuomas Ihme (VTT), Prof. Tapio Seppänen (University of Oulu) and Prof. Olli Silvén (University of Oulu) as other board members. In evaluation a special evaluation sheet will be used, available on this page.

Course work requirements

The course work concentrates on literature search, and analysis and reporting of the findings. The course work requirements must be agreed with the student’s supervisor, depending on the earlier experience of the student. Since we request that the student has a supervisor, the latter will have the main responsibility in defining the relevant research problem with the student.

The proposal for the requirements with clear reasons (including the student’s background, see below) must be sent to Anna-Liisa Ratilainen, VTT Electronics, P.O. Box 1100, 90571 Oulu, email Anna-Liisa.Ratilainen(at)vtt.fi, so that it is received by 24.11.2005 (more details below). The decision on the requirements will be sent to the student by email by 22.12.2005. The course work must be received by Anna-Liisa Ratilainen by 30.4.2006 (more details below). Detailed guidelines can be found from the textbooks and from the lectures, see also the additional material.

Proposal for the course work

You can select your approach depending on your background and as agreed with the supervisor and advisor. The course work proposal must be done before the final report since all students have a different background and they need a different approach which must be adjusted accordingly, and this adjustment must be coordinated. The evaluation of the proposal is also part of the guidance given by the editorial board. The course work about an actual (not hypothetic) research topic should be useful and challenging to everyone.

The proposal for the requirements can be rather brief (2-3 pages), but should include the following separate parts with suitable headings when appropriate:

(1) the title of the proposal including less than ten words, referring to the topic

(2) the name of the student and his employer, supervisor and advisor,

(3) a brief abstract of the suggested work,

(4) a tentative table of contents of the final report, and a very brief summary of the intended contents of each section, including suggested keywords and the starting point (an original paper) for the literature search (give the full bibliographic data),

(5) biography of the student including 100-150 words, covering degrees and when they were received and on which topics, and

(6) list of the student’s own earlier publications with full bibliographic data.

If the student has already done an extensive literature search for the Ph.D. thesis, he or she can make also a detailed proposal for the Ph.D. thesis, or a scientific paper as an attachment of a report (preferably accepted when the course work is submitted). In this case the course work should still include a brief summary of the relevant literature, a detailed discussion on the originality and significance of the work, and a detailed plan for own publications that will be prepared for the thesis. Please name explicitly all conferences and journals and their deadlines. If the student is proposing a publication, he or she should not simply copy the text from the publication to the report since its purpose is to present the paper in a wider scope. The report will then work as an extended introduction to the paper.

Final course work

The final report should include 10-20 pages (excluding the possible figures and tables) with suitably selected titles for the sections. You are encouraged to write the course work with LaTeX. LaTeX is a system for typesetting documents and has become a lingua franca of the scientific world. Thus many scientific books and journal papers are made with LaTeX, especially those which include many equations. A LaTeX template can be found from page www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,5-164-2-72376-0,00.html. An editor (WinEdt) can be downloaded from page www.winedt.com and the LaTeX itself (MiKTeX) can be downloaded from www.miktex.org.

Define a research problem, suitable keywords, which are combined with logical operators AND and OR in the literature search, and a starting point (a recent original paper, see below) for your search. Use at least three databases: (i) either INSPEC or COMPENDEX, (ii) either IEEE/IEE Electronic Library, IEL (with IEEE Xplore user interface) or ACM Digital Library, or a corresponding electronic library of another scientific society, and (iii) Science Citation Index included in the Web of Science, especially General Search and Cited Reference Search. In addition, you cans use other databases as NTIS, see the additional material. If you know good authors, use their names as keywords. Try several different keywords, use iteratively both lists of references of papers and citation indices to find the state of the art papers (for example in IEEE Xplore, see the tool AbstractPlus-Citing Documents, valid only for new papers; or Science Citation Index, see Cited Reference Search). The databases are available at the University of Oulu at www.kirjasto.oulu.fi and at VTT at intranet.vtt.fi/siniset/tietpalv/kirjasto.

In general, start the search from a recent original paper, say a conference paper from 2004-2005. Use the databases to find the state of the art literature. Make a list of at least 3-5 landmark textbooks, 1-5 review papers and 10-20 original landmark journal and conference papers and read them. Good book publishers include for example McGraw-Hill (www.mhhe.com), Prentice-Hall (vig.prenhall.com) and John Wiley & Sons (www.wiley.com). In addition, journal and newest conference papers of scientific societies such as ACM (www.acm.org), APS (www.aps.org), IEEE (www.ieee.org) and SPIE (www.spie.org) are recommended. Landmark papers are those that are often found in bibliographies, for example in the lists of references of recent books, review papers and other original papers. In Science Citation Index in the General Search you can select as a document type a review or bibliography. In your report, refer only to those references that you have read. We do not request that you read all the pages of the textbooks. Refer only to scientific books and papers, and in general do not use references to works that are not published or refereed. Furthermore, do not in general refer to www pages.

Organize the material according to the relationships and significance of the original papers by developing a taxonomy or classification. Write a brief summary of the historical progress of the area by reading the reviews of literature in the introduction of recent landmark papers and the citations to some old landmark papers in the Science Citation Index. Do not simply copy the sentences from the paper, but formulate your own sentences. Define clearly all new terms by using dictionaries (see the additional material) and recent publications. In definitions you can use the original text. Good examples for review papers are such papers in Proceedings of the IEEE and IEEE Journals and Transactions, for example S. Haykin, ”Cognitive radio: brain-empowered wireless communications,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 23, pp. 201 – 220, February 2005. A more extensive example is E. Biglieri, J. Proakis, and S. Shamai, ”Fading channels: information-theoretic and communications aspects,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 44, pp. 2619 – 2692, Oct. 1998. Both are available in IEL (IEEE Xplore).

The final report should include the following separate parts with suitable headings when appropriate:

(1) the title of the report including less than ten words, referring to the topic

(2) the name of the student and employer, the supervisor and the advisor,

(3) an abstract including 75-200 words and about four keywords below the abstract,

(4) an introduction including a brief reference to the best landmark books, reviews, and original papers,

(5) problem and hypothesis, including keywords and used databases,

(6) a well organized review of literature using a taxonomy or classification of the state of the art information,

(7) summary of the main historical landmarks of the research area leading to the state of the art,

(8) discussion and conclusions,

(9) references with full bibliographic data, and

(10) brief biography of the student including 100-150 words, covering the degrees and when they were received.

Infotech Oulu Graduate School Courses

Infotech Oulu Graduate School

How to Get a Ph.D.: Methods and Practical Hints (2005-2006)

Important dates

General contents

Program

I Session 13.9.2005 at 2-5 pm

II Session 20.9.2005 at 2-5 pm

III Session 27.9.2005 at 2-5 pm

IV Session 11.10.2005 at 2-5 pm

V Session 18.10.2005 at 2-5 pm

Additional material