April 20, 20231

Our team: Undergrad Anand Sawant, Ruben Verboon, Gargi Prasad, Arnoud Bakker, Nassos Antoniou, Thomas de Ruiter, … Grad Siqi Shen, Nezih Yigitbasi, Ozan Sonmez Staff Henk Sips, Dick Epema, Alexandru Iosup Collaborators Ion Stoica and the Mesos team (UC Berkeley), Thomas Fahringer, Radu Prodan (U. Innsbruck), Nicolae Tapus, Mihaela Balint, Vlad Posea (UPB), Derrick Kondo, Emmanuel Jeannot (INRIA), Assaf Schuster, Mark Silberstein, Orna Ben-Yehuda (Technion), ...

TU Delft Challent/Honours Programme

Alexandru Iosup

Parallel and Distributed Systems GroupDelft University of TechnologyThe Netherlands

SPEC RG Cloud Meeting

B.Sc. Students Doing Research!?

1.

2. Only if students are capable and can be motivated.

3. Beneficial to both them and us. They learn a broad skill set. They also learn to think independently. We get to train, rather than import, a new generation.

April 20, 20232

Hendricks, Meijer, vd Velden, Iosup, Procedural Content Generation for Games: A Survey, ACM TOMCCAP, 2012

High-impact publi(best in the field)

Beneficial to Them

New Skill SetDear Alexandru,

I didn't expect to find a publication under the Christmas tree.

I'm very happy with the outcome. It was certainly a long journey, but I believe that the full process was very educational. For fun I compared the Bachelorseminarium-version with the current one: the difference is huge, not only in content but also in writing style.

Last semester I wrote a literature survey as part of a course. Thanks to the tricks you taught me, I got a really good mark. Additionally, my supervisors have decided to co-author the paper. We hope to send a first version to the reviewers in Januari.

Best wishes for 2012! April 20, 20233

Beneficial to Them

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

• I wish this opportunity was there when I was 20• vs “Getting a diploma is all that matters”• Academia competes with TV, music, Internet, gaming,

… anything daddy’s money can buy • … actually, their own money:

26 hours study, 14 hours work[Leo Borghans, 20006]

April 20, 20234

Beneficial to Us

IT Industry Competitiveness

April 20, 20235

Source: The Economist, Benchmarking IT industry competitiveness 2009 http://portal.bsa.org/2009eiu/study/2009_eiu_global.pdf

NL only Top-20, in 2011

Beneficial to Us

Where’s the Human Capital?

April 20, 20236

“A longer-term challenge for some European countries is encouraging more graduates to choose science-related subjects.”• NL is 27th in HC

Source: The Economist, Benchmarking IT industry competitiveness 2009

April 20, 20237

Main Goal: Educate Capable BSc Students in Doing Research in Computer Science• Research, the pleasure of finding things out

• Reading• Writing• Formulating a research question• The process of answering the question

• In Computer Science• The world is changing: people spend 1 billion hours per

month in Zynga’s online games, more on online social networking, etc.

• The process is increasingly experimental (so, fun!)• Results can affect millions of people (so, socially cool!)

Approach: Embed B.Sc. Students in Our Research, Teach Them to Swim in the Ocean• Anand Sawant, Co-Scalability of Online Game

Design and Infrastructure• Online Gaming + Cloud Computing• Riskier topic, more fun

• Ruben Verboon, Scheduling Policies for Scientific Workloads in Cloud-Based Environment• Cloud Computing• Continues work by former M.Sc./Ph.D. students• Less risk, possibly more impact (not surprising)

April 20, 20238

Lessons Learned

• Students• Culture shock, but quick to integrate• Difficult to switch from “time = results” • Difficult to switch from “solution a la carte”• Learning quickly (Challent students, after all)• In general, motivated—challenged for the first time?

• Approach• Statistics, systems, performance evaluation, …

Students learn another sets of skills, besides research• Time allocated for research? There’s no “1 hour for

research today, 0.5 hours tomorrow, …, total 4 hours per week”

• Lesson in risk assessment and managementApril 20, 2023

10

Suggestions for Programme Managers

1. Is the research topic another B.Sc. / M.Sc. Thesis? What to do with it? Suggestion: cum laudae guaranteed upon success.

2. Students struggle to find time blocks for research.Suggestion: set at least one day per week for research.

3. Travel money needed to get students places.Suggestion: set budget of 2,500EUR for conference where students present (US) + 1,500EUR for conference where they participate (EU)

April 20, 202311

April 20, 202312

Conclusion Take-Home MessageConclusion Take-Home Message

• B.Sc. students in research• Possible to achieve top results• Beneficial to both them and us

• Challent students in research• Approach: embed in research group, deep-ocean swimming• Eager, intelligent, adaptable students• Break culture of “time = results”• Break culture of “solution a la carte”• Lesson in risk assessment and management

• Suggestions for Challent Managers• Cum laudae is due• Time block• Travel money

Alexandru IosupA.Iosup@tudelft.nlhttp://www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/~iosup/ (or google “iosup”)Parallel and Distributed Systems GroupDelft University of Technology

Do not hesitate to contact me…