Database Technology Dat5/F9D/DE3/Inf7 Fall 2008

Overview

In the Dat5/F9D/DE3/Inf7 course, we cover a mixture of classical and emerging topics within database technology. This includes  mobile services, location-based services, business intelligence, and different aspects of database performance, including indexing and query processing. In addition, the course introduces Streamspin, which is a new and innovative platform for delivering and recieving mobile services. The course will consist of 15 seminars.

A high degree of interaction and frequent discussions will be encouraged. It is expected that you attend all sessions, read  the papers for each session, and are able to pose questions to the presenters about the papers (see note about the opponent system below). Note that it may in some cases, e.g., when presenting a paper yourself, be necessary to read additional papers referenced by your paper in order to fully understand your own paper. A good place to find papers is the DBLP online bibliography and Google Scholar.

Schedule

Lectures are scheduled Mondays between 12.30 and 14:15 in 0.2.11. The table below contains the details about the preparation for the seminars.

The course consists of following parts.

• Presentations by the supervisors. This provides an overview of the course and some of the issues covered in the course.
• One presentation of a technical paper for each student.
• Presentations of projects by each of the group at the end of the course

Note that links to the papers can only be accessed from the university network!

Presentation Requirements

The following is a list of requirements for the presentations. The requirements must be followed, unless specific permission is given by the course teachers.

• The total time spent on a presentation is about 35 minutes. This means that the presentation must be rehearsed beforehand to get an estimate of the time spent, and the necessary modifications made afterwards. It is important to actually say out loud all words of the presentation. Only this way is it possible to get a good feeling for the length of the talk and to identify trouble spots in the presentation that need further work. After the presentation, we will spend about 15 minutes on discussing the paper and the presentation.
• The presentations must contain concrete examples. It is often time-consuming and difficult to construct good, specific examples, but the time spent on this is well spent. Important observations that the listener should definitely understand are prime candidates for exemplification.
• The presentation must be shown to the project supervisor 72 hours before the course presentation, and any modifications required by the supervisor must be made to the presentation.
• The slides must be sent to simas [at] cs.aau.dk after the presentation. They will then be put on the web page.
• Each student must present 1 paper.
• Each student must be the opponent for two paper presentations. The opponents read the paper particularly carefully and are required to be able to ask detailed questions about the paper and discuss it in a detail.

Presentation Guidelines

The following is a list of guidelines for the presentations. The guidelines may be adapted to the specific situation in which they are used.

• Make sure that the presentation has a simple structure and that the listener understands and is able to follow the structure during the presentation. There should probably be an overview slide at the beginning and a talk summary/conclusions slide at the end. It may be useful to remind the listener of the structure during the presentation. The outline of the presentation can also be written on the board, where it can be pointed to throughout the presentation.
• It is often a good idea to divide a presentation into three separate parts. The first part should present the material without criticism, but be as faithfully to the authors as possible. The second part then relates the material to a) related work, e.g., as presented on DAT5 and b) your DAT5 project. The third part evaluates both form and content of the presented material, i.e., good and bad points. A self-evaluation of the presentation is also possible. The time spent on these parts should be about 28, 4, and 3 minutes, respectively (give or take a few minutes).
• Do try to use figures effectively. Although these can take some time to draw and although it may take some time to do them exactly right, they can be very effective in communicating the most important points of a presentation.
• Rehearse the presentation in front of an audience before the exam.
• Make sure that the slides are easy to present. If some transitions between slides are difficult to remember then the slides should probably be revised. Again, the way to identify problems is through saying all the words out loud.
• Do number the slides; this makes it easier for the listeners to later refer to them.
• For the exam, it is a good idea to have everything on the slides so that there is no need to draw spontaneous pictures on the board.

Project Presentation Guidelines