SET seminar

The time table for this course can be found on Canvas.

Time and location: Wednesday, 15:45-17:30 (7th and 8th hour) and Friday, 10:45-12:30 (3rd and 4th hour) at Traverse room 2. Note that classes will only take place on some of these weekdays and during some weeks of the quartile.
Target audience: Master (CSE,ES,BIS) students interested in Software Engineering. Students intending to work on their graduation project with Software Engineering & Technology as specialisation are expected to participate in the seminar.
Teachers: Anton Wijs and Muhammad Osama.

Background information on the course:

This SET seminar has several purposes:

Getting acquainted with the research topics related to the Software Engineering and Technology specialisation.
Getting acquainted with the basic principles of academic research, such are reading and reviewing scientific papers, presenting scientific results both in oral and written form. This can be seen as a preparation for your Master Thesis project.

At the end of the seminar we expect that you are able to perform:

Preparing and executing a literature search; including preparation of bibliographic references
Critical reading, reviewing of literature; judging relevance/quality, summarizing, classifying, comparing, etc.
Critical listening to presentations, asking probing questions in dicussions.
Setting up a small-scale academic investigation.
Preparing and giving oral presentations.
Writing a technical article/report.

If you do your Master Thesis project related to the Software Engineering and Technology specialisation, you can use this seminar to prepare yourself by choosing scientific papers related to the topic of your thesis.

The SET seminar consists of compulsory meetings. These meetings will also be attended by the MDSE staff and occasionally by students doing their Master thesis project. Frequency of meetings will depend on the number of participants.

Assignments and grading First, you will get one preparatory assignment (A). After this, you will be asked to propose a topic for a (small) independent study (P), present it orally (O) and in writing (W), and review a paper by another student (R). Each one of those will be graded on the scale of 10 (1 - lowest, 10 - highest).

The final grade = 0.2 * A + 0.1 * P + 0.2 * O + 0.4 * W + 0.1 * R.

All written assignments (A,P,W,R) should be submitted via Canvas no later than midnight (Eindhoven time) of the stated date. No late submissions will be accepted.

Preparatory assignments
A description of the preparatory assignment can be found in Canvas, together with its deadline. This is an exercise to get familiar with conducting academic research.

Choosing a research topic: Research proposal
You will conduct a mini-research either related to the themes presented by the staff or related to your MSc project. You have to find the relevant papers, write a report on these papers based on some by yourself formulated research proposition. There is no minimal number of papers you have to read. Details concerning the P assignment can be found in Peach. You are expected to regularly meet with your supervisor to keep track of your progress.

Oral presentations
You will give two presentations at the seminar. The first one will be part of a mini-workshop which is meant to present an initial idea for your research proposal before writing it down. This presentation should take 5 minutes, and will not be graded. It allows the audience to give early feedback and pointers. In the second presentation (O), you will present the findings of your research. This should take 15 minutes. After this presentation, the audience will get an opportunity to ask questions and provide the presenter with feedback.

Tips for giving scientific presentations

Writing an essay
The essay should be at least 10 pages. If the selected topic is related to the MSc project, the written report could be the related work section or the feasibility study of the final thesis.

Reviewing a presentation (Use this form to review each other's presentations)

Presentation peer review form

Reviewing a report (Use this structure to write an (anonymous!) review about each other's preliminary documents)

Report peer review guidelines

The time table for this course can be found on Canvas.