Hints for PhD Proposal Defenses

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www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/proposal-hints.html

Hints for Writing a PhD Proposal

By Angelos Keromytis (April 2010)

:

a description of the problem in enough detail to clearly state the thesis proposition (next item)a proper, concise thesis proposition; this is not an abstract statement like "we're going to investigate the

insider problem", but something along the lines of "our hypothesis is that the use of XYZ technology in

environment Z under constraints Q can identify insider attackers with probability Z" --- obviously, the

fewer qualifiers the better, but you also need to be accurate; since this is a thesis proposal, we will cut you

some slack -- but it's in your best interest to think hard about this, since it is the anchor point of your

whole thesis (and the next few years' worth of work for you)

a description of the related work, how it does not solve the problem, and how your hypothesis has not

been tested before

preliminary results (if any) that indicate that you have reason to believe that the hypothesis holds

additional experiments that you will run to prove that the hypothesis holdswhat you'll need to build to run said experiments (and what you've already built)

what happens if you can't run some of these experiments, or if they give you "bad" results --- what's your

failover?

what are the expected contributions, keeping in mind that each major contribution must demonstrate

novelty, non-triviality, and usefulness (so, "first", "best", "only" are good adjectives here)

how long you expect all this to take

Hints for PhD Proposal Defenses

PhD proposal defenses in Computer Science allow student audience; this is a good opportunity to find ou

what works and doesn't from your more senior colleagues.

Proposal defenses consist of four parts: first, the candidate introduces themselves, then presents a

summary of their work, interrupted and followed by questions from the committee. Finally, the committee

meets in private to discuss the presentation and the plan.

While most of the committee will have read most of your proposal, you cannot assume that everyone has

read every page in detail.

Avoid high-level talks: "... they usually fail to convey the intellectual substance, creativity, ingenuity of the

speakers' accomplishments - what takes the work out of the routine. Naturally, these comments apply toall of our speakers who want to impress people with their ability as opposed to the breadth of their

knowledge or the size of their project." (Ed Coffman)

When presenting experimental work, be prepared to defend your methodology. What was your sample

size? Confidence intervals?

Standard presentation guidelines apply:

Talk to your audience, not to your slides.

Project; speaking softly conveys the impression that you are unsure of what you are saying.

Make sure that all your graphs are readable. Check this in the actual presentation environment


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(using a video projector), not just on your laptop screen. A common problem is that the lines are

too thin.

Avoid flashy or cheesy animations, such as animated GIFs, or PowerPoint word art. This is not a

sales talk and these gimmicks distract from the message and make you look unprofessional.

Keep to the allotted time of no more than 45 minutes.

Your presentation needs to address the following:

What is the problemyou are studying?

Why is it important?What resultshave you achieved so far and why to they matter?

How is this substantiallydifferent from prior work?

What do you need to do to complete your work?

Your workplan should be sufficiently detailed so that the committee can judge whether it is realistic or not.

You don't have to account for every day between the proposal and your thesis defense, but a roughly

monthly or quarterly granularity is to be expected, depending on how far away your anticipated graduation

date is. Specify the experiments you need to run, the software you need to write and the algorithms you

want to try out. This should not just be one page that says "I will do miraculous things".

The committee should be handed a copy of your slides.

No more than 25 slides, plus "back up" slides with additional material in case of questions. The committee

will get anxious once the presentation lasts longer than 35-40 minutes.

List your contributions early and explicitly. You don't want to create the impression that related work is

yours, and vice versa.

One of the most important concerns during the proposal is to convince the audience that you are aware of

all related work. Since some of your work may date back a few years, it is not sufficient to just copy the

reference list from your first paper. Check common recent conferences to see whether any recent work

applies to your thesis. If applicable, point out your work predates work presented by somebody else

done more recently. (Given the duration of most theses, it is not uncommon that others pursue a direction

after you have stopped working on it.)When presenting your contributions, be sure to use "I" and not "we" so that the committee will know what

aspects of the work where yours, and which were group projects.

You must convey a clear plan how you are going to evaluate your work systematically - by measurement,

simulation, user experiments. This is a core part what makes computer science science and not just

software-building.

Be prepared to back up any comparative statement with facts, in particular statements like "works better"

"faster", "scalable" or "optimal". If you are presenting a protocol, how do you know that it works

correctly? If your algorithm is optimal, can you prove that it is? (If not, avoid the term.)

Thesis Contributions

By Yechiam Yemini (March 2010):

A thesis contribution is a technical result that is both substantially novel and creates significant new

knowledge.

A technical result is a solution of a technical problem. There are four types of technical results:

a. A theory consisting of a body of theorems and their proofs from first principles.


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b. An algorithm that computes certain output from a given input.

c. A performance analysis describing quantifiable behaviors of a large class of mechanisms, or

characterizing optimal selection of their control parameters.

d. A design for a hardware, software or protocol mechanism capable of resolving a broad class

of problems.

A result is substantially novel if it cannot be derived as a simple application or extension of known

results. A result creates significant new knowledge if it is (a) not obvious; and (b) if it is sufficiently

abstract to be applicable to a large class of problems.

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Last updated 04/16/2010 19:20:15 by Henning Schulzrinne
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Hints for PhD Proposal Defenses