RESEARCH GROUP

DATABASES AND

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Organization

Announcements (as of 05.03.2024)

The course is held in the summer term 2024. For infos on registration and course materal, see below.

If you have any questions, contact Elias at kuiter@ovgu.de.

Target Audience

This course is intended for Master students who intend to pursue an academic career. We especially recommend this course for Master students that consider to continue in a PhD position or want to practice academic writing in English for their thesis.

• All participants should be interested in academic research and in practicing academic writing.
• As a Master student, you receive 6 CP for this course (regarding the module, see above).
• Although PhD students will not receive a grade or "Schein", we encourage them to participate in this course to practice academic writing and to prepare a paper for their own research project (to be sent to another conference or workshop or to be published as a technical report).

Goals

The participating students will simulate a scientific conference to acquire skills required for ...

• writing academic papers
• presenting scientific results
• participating in a conference
• reviewing academic papers of others
• organizing a conference
• using a web-based paper submission and review system

Structure

In summary, you will write an academic paper (with two chances to improve it after the initial version), write reviews (such that every student writes reviews for two papers of other students), and present your work (a short initial presentation, a practice presentation, and a final presentation at the conference event).

The course consists of a lecture that introduces topics such as academic writing, research ethics, organizing a conference, and presentation. The main focus will be on writing your own academic paper, reviewing papers by others, and presenting your results in front of the group.

• Every participant writes an academic paper, typically giving an overview of the current state and future challenges of a selected research area from software engineering or database systems. We are open for a wide range of topics that can align with other research projects (e.g., part of PhD research or preparation for a Diploma or Master's thesis). You can approach us with your own topic or choose from a list of given topics on software engineering or database systems.
• Every participant presents his topic (and relevant literature) in a short presentation, for first feedback.
• After about six weeks, every participant submits a first version of his/her paper, which is subsequently reviewed by at least 3 other participants.
• Another two or three days later, an improved version of the paper based on the reviewers comments is submitted and subsequently reviewed again.
• The paper can then be improved one last time. A final version is submitted at the end of the semester.
• All papers are presented in a conference. This conference will take place on a whole day near the end of the semester (July or August, date is fixed during the semester). Before the conference, every participant will practice their presentation and get feedback from the others for possible improvements.

Although there are relatively few lectures, we expect that participants focus on reading, writing, reviewing and presentation and we recommend that you reserve at least one day per week (6 CP = 180h = about 12 hours per week). Remember to start working on the papers early - deadlines are strict! The first submitted draft of paper must be mostly complete (including all chapters), so you can receive useful feedback.

The course will be graded based on the pre-versions of the paper, the final version, the reviews and the presentation.

In this master level course, we expect everyone to be familiar with basic rules of scientific referencing/citations and will not accept plagiarism of any kind in your work. In particular, copying sentences from third party work fully or in parts, or "rephrasing" sentences in order to hide plagiarism, will be treated as plagiarism and reflect on your grade. We also do not accept AI-generated text.

Registration & Prerequisites

 In order to provide enough topics, we require students to register for the course (registration via Moodle).

We recommend that participants have knowledge in advanced database or software engineering technologies, as these are the research areas of the proposed topics.