In this exercise you will send email from a proper email client and do some research on the web.
Read through all of the instructions before you start.
For this exercise you will need to set up a proper email client to access your TU Graz email account. A proper email client speaks IMAP (or POP) protocol to receive incoming email and SMTP protocol to send outgoing email. This includes mail clients such as Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail, Mulberry, Eudora, Outlook, and Windows Live Mail.
Do not use webmail for this exercise! Using a web browser to access a webmail account is not the same as using a proper email client.
If you are having problems, read the lecture notes carefully, read through the information from the university computer services, or take a look at our short guide.
Start work on this exercise early. It is very hard to diagnose problems with email settings from afar. Start early enough, so that if you are having problems configuring your email client, you can take your laptop with you to your next tutorial.
Compose a new email with the following message body:
Dear Tutor,
Please send me Exercise 3.
Give your email a Subject line of the form:
inm-ws2014-tN-ex31-surname-forename-matrnr
where tN is replaced by your tutorial group number
(e.g. t3). surname and forename are your
surname (family name) and forename as in TUGrazOnline (but using
only lower case letters and numbers from the 7-bit ASCII
character set, no special characters, no spaces, no underscores). If
you have more than one forename or surname, use only
your first forename and your first surname. If any
of your names contains an umlaut (ü), write it out in long form
(ue). matrnr is replaced by your Matrikelnummer
(e.g. 1130999).
For example, if your name is Jürgen Thomas Anders-Schwarz, MatrNr 1130999, and you are in group T3, the subject line should be:
inm-ws2014-t3-ex31-anders-juergen-1130999
This is so that we can collect and save your emails with corresponding file names with minimal effort.
If you compose the above subject line in an editor, then select it with your mouse to paste it into Thunderbird, be careful that no spurious characters are copied as well. If you have Thunderbird set to compose HTML by default, sometimes HTML tags are copied as well, then converted to vertical bars when the message is sent as plain text.
Stop. Do not send your email yet. Read through all of the instructions first, including "Bear in Mind" below.
Compose your message as a standard, inline, plain text email, using UTF-8 character encoding.
Enter your TU Graz email address into the CC field, to send a copy of your mail to your TU Graz email address. Keep this copy in your TU Graz inbox as proof of sending in case of technical difficulties.
Send a test message to yourself. Check everything is OK.
Send your email to the following email address:
sapphire-submissions-inm-2014-ex31@iicm.edu
Your email will then be saved and processed, and you should receive an automated reply email containing further specific instructions for Ex 3.2 (below).
Send your email using your real name, composed of your first name plus your surname, for example "Keith Andrews". Your real name should be written using only 7-bit ASCII characters (no umlauts), for example "Juergen Weiss".
Send your email using your TU Graz email address, so that
we can identify you (princess@gmx.at is no good!).
The subject line should be formatted as above and should contain only lower case letters, numbers, and hyphens from the 7-bit ASCII character set. No special characters, no spaces, no underscores.
Send your email using a proper email client, such as Thunderbird, Mulberry, Eudora, Outlook, or Windows Live Mail. Do not use webmail! [We want to check that you can configure a proper email client].
The body of your email must be in plain text only using UTF-8 character encoding. Do not send HTML, a word document, or an attachment of any kind.
Your email should have a valid email signature.
Here, we mean an email signature of max 4 lines appended to the bottom of your email with a valid sig separator (see the lecture notes). Use of a cryptographic signature such as PGP/MIME or S/MIME is optional for email messages in INM. Do not use a cryptographic signature for newsgroup messages in INM.
Keep the copy of your mail (which you CCed to your TU Graz email address) in your TU Graz inbox as proof of sending in case of technical difficulties.
Your tutor will not be very happy if you keep resending improved versions of your email. You can practice by sending email to yourself, or by sending email to a secondary email address.
And all of the other relevant points in the lecture notes.
Your tutor (via our autoresponder) will reply with an email containing your topic for this exercise. Note that topics will vary between students, so complete the topic which you receive.
This year, the exercise involves researching a computer scientist:
Research and write a short report about the person you have been given. Your report should have three sections, plus the references, as follows:
For these personal details:
Determine these personal details as far as you can through web research, do not send personal email asking.
Cite any online source(s) you used and include a reference for each online source (including a full URL) in the References section.
What is the most recent publication (paper) in the IEEE
Explore digital library (
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/)
which has a DOI, which has at least 4 pages, and of which
the person is a (co-)author?
Give the following details of the paper:
In the email with the name of your personality, you will also have been told:
Use this information to double-check that you have found the correct publication.
What is the most recent publication (paper) in the ACM
digital library
(http://acm.org/dl) which
has a DOI, which has at least 4 pages, for which the publisher is ACM,
and of which the person is a (co-)author?
Give the following details of the paper:
Only consider publications where the publisher is ACM.
In the email with the name of your personality, your tutor will also have told you:
Use this information to double-check that you have found the correct publication.
For the two papers:
You must fetch the original PDFs from the ACM and IEEE digital libararies.
You do not have to pay for the PDFs. The university has subscriptions to both the ACM and IEEE digital libraries. You can fetch the PDFs for free from an IP address of the university. Use VPN if you are off-campus.
Do not use an alternative source (google search, web site of one of the authors) for the PDF, because the PDF might not be identical to the original and thus the MD5 checksum will be different too.
MD5 is a kind of hash function, which can be used to generate a compact digital fingerprint (checksum) of a file. It is very unlikely (although possible) that any two non-identical files will have the same MD5 fingerprint. RFC 1321 is the official MD5 specification.
Download sites often publish MD5 checksums for files, so that users can verify that a file has not changed or been tampered with. There are many software implementations of MD5 file verification. I personally use md5deep.
For example, this paper of mine (PDF, 512167 bytes) has an MD5 checksum of "D1ADF48AFA32BD13067C62FD526C2AC6".
Write a short summary (100 to 200 words of your own) of the paper you found in the IEEE digital library above:
Include a direct quotation from the paper, following the rules of acceptable academic practice.
For example:
As Andrews [2002, page 794] succinctly puts it:
“The information pyramids approach utilises three dimensions to compactly visualise large hierarchies. A plateau represents the top of the hierarchy (or root of the tree). Other, smaller plateaus arranged on top of it represent its subtrees. Separate icons are used to represent non-subtree members of a node such as files or documents. The general impression is that of pyramids growing upwards as the hierarchy grows deeper.”
The words in the direct quotation do not count towards the number of words in your summary.
Write in your own words (except, obviously, for the direct quotation).
At the end of your report, after the paper summary, include a list of references.
Each reference to a conference or journal paper must include at least the following pieces of information:
Each reference to an online source (web page) must include at least the following pieces of information:
For example:
References
Andrews, Keith [2002]. Visual Exploration of Large Hierarchies with Information Pyramids. In Proc. Sixth International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV'02), pages 793-798. IEEE Computer Society Press, London, England. doi:10.1109/IV.2002.1028871.
Andrews, Keith [2012]. Keith Andrews. IICM web site. http://www.iicm.tugraz.at/keith.
For the report as a whole:
Research your report online.
You may write your report either in English or in German.
A DOI looks something like this "10.1145/1168149.1168151". Any preceding "http://..." prefix is not part of the DOI. In print, a DOI should be written with the prefix "doi:" like this: "doi:10.1145/1168149.1168151".
You must link each DOI to a working URL using the generic DOI resolver, by prepending the prefix of the resolver "http://dx.doi.org/" to the DOI to form a working URL. The prefix is not visible in the text, only as part of the link.
In other words, combine a written DOI "doi:10.1145/1168149.1168151" with a link to the generic resolver, like this: doi:10.1145/1168149.1168151
These generic links should always work (report it
to doi.org if it does not work). Always use the generic
resolver, do not use ACM or IEEE links.
Link all of your DOIs in this way, including those in the references.
You may write your report using whichever writing tool you prefer (for example LaTeX, Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, OpenOffice Writer, ...), but you must hand in a PDF file which follows the form and structure of this example.
We have prepared the following templates for you to use if you wish:
You can install the free PDFCreator or CutePDF to create PDF from Microsoft Word.
Your PDF file should be no larger than 1 mb in size.
Your PDF file must contain text characters. This is standard when you create a PDF file from Microsoft Word, LaTeX, or other text processing programs.
It is possible to create a PDF containing pages captured as bitmap (raster) images (which look similar to fax pages), but which do not contain searchable text, for example by printing out a document and then scanning it in as PDF. This is not what we want here.
Any URLs in your PDF file should be clickable.
Name your PDF file according to the following scheme:
inm-ws2014-tN-ex32-surname-forename-matrnr.pdf
where tN is replaced by your tutorial group number
(e.g. t3). surname and
forename are your surname (family name) and forename as
in TUGrazOnline (but using only lower case letters from the
7-bit ASCII character set, no special characters, no spaces, no
underscores). If you have more than one forename or surname, use only
your first forename and your first surname. If any
of your names contains an umlaut (ü), write it out in long form
(ue). matrnr is replaced by your Matrikelnummer (e.g. 1130999).
For example, if your name is Jürgen Thomas Anders-Schwarz, MatrNr 1130999, and you are in group T3, the subject line should be:
inm-ws2014-t3-ex32-anders-juergen-1130999.pdf
Submit your report in PDF format to the Sapphire online course
management system
sapphire.iicm.tugraz.at.
For a conference paper, the publication date is taken to be the first day of the conference unless stated otherwise.
We will not answer questions along the lines of "Is this the right paper?" If the MD5 checksums match, then it is the right paper. Otherwise not.
When researching at the IEEE Digital Library:
The IEEE Explore digital library now has a special Author Search, where you enter first name, middle name, and last name separately.
In the Basic Search, a search for "Andrews" or "Andrews K" will often turn up plenty of matches by other authors with the same name and sometimes initials. Open the PDF to check the author's full name and affiliation to make sure it is the correct author. Searches for "Groller E", "Groeller E", and "Gröller E" all turn up different results for the TU Wien researcher Edi (Eduard) Gröller, each including both "E. M." and "E." variants. All six of these variations in fact find different publications by Edi Gröller. "Groeller Eduard" is a seventh.
In the Author panel on the left hand side, you can collect several potential variations of the author's name and combine them by pressing Refresh Results. For Edi Gröller, try and collect all seven variants.
Alternatively, in the Advanced Search specify: "Groller in Authors OR Groeller in Authors OR Gröller in Authors" to find 68 matching papers. You then have to check that these are by the correct Edi Gröller.
Remember to re-sort the result by "Newest first".
Even when sorted by "Newest first", publications in the same year are not necessarily sorted by date. You have to check the publication date manually by clicking on the paper title.
Also check the topic the paper describes. If it is in a different field from what you expected, double check that you have the correct author and not someone else with the same name.
You can search and read paper abstracts without needing an account. To download the full papers (usually in PDF), you need to access the IEEE DL from an IP address within the address range (TUGnet, 129.27.*) of the TU Graz. You can do this from off campus by "logging in" to the TU Graz using the VPN.
When researching at the ACM Digital Library:
For this exercise, be careful to limit your serach to "Publications from ACM and Affiliated Organizations" and not to search in "The ACM Guide to Computing Literature". The ACM Guide is a much larger database, containing metadata from partners such as IEEE and Springer, so you will generally find more matching documents. However, many of these are not availble in full text (PDF) from ACM, but are linked to the original publisher.
Using the default search, you will sometimes find matches to an entire journal issue or an entire conference proceedings book, where your person is an editor (and not an author). This is not what we want. Using the Advanced Search, you can restrict the Name to the Authors field.
Enclose full names in double quotation marks: "Keith Andrews". Otherwise, you will get matches to papers with authors like "Duncan Andrew and Keith McRoberts".
By default, the search results are listed in order of relevance (to the query). You have to change the sort order manually to list the results by publication date.
Sometimes, an author's name is clickable, and after clicking on it, you reach a web page for that author. The publications in this list include all publications, both from ACM and its many partners, not just those published by ACM.
The search results sometimes include matches to other authors with the same family name (and sometimes the same first name and/or same initials), so double-check that the person you are looking for really is one of the co-authors.
You can search and read paper abstracts without needing an account. To download the full papers (usually in PDF), you need to access the ACM DL from an IP address within the address range (TUGnet, 129.27.*) of the TU Graz. You can do this from off campus by "logging in" to the TU Graz using the VPN.
You can also log into the ACM DL with a personal ACM account, if you have one.
You must write your report in your own words. Copying verbatim (exactly, word for word) from the web or from someone else is not allowed (unless you are making a direct quotation).
You must use online sources, not printed books or other non-online sources.
You must give full references for the papers (including DOIs) and
online sources (including URLs) you mention. Simply
stating "via Google" or "from wikipedia.org" is not
enough.
Do not post your research to the TU Graz newsgroups or give it to anyone else!
And all of the other relevant points in the lecture notes.