Programming Languages Research Seminar (Reading)
- ÕIS data: MTAT.03.271, 3 ECTS
- Time: Fridays, 14:15 - 16:00
- Place: Liivi 2-512
- Language English is preferred
- Contact: vesal@ut.ee
What's the point?
The primary goal of this seminar is to read and understand some of the top papers in the field of programming languages. This should give you a better sense of this field of research and help you decide on your specialization. I also hope that you will improve your presentation and paper writing skills in the process.
What do I have to do?
- To pass this course, you are expected to study a research paper and give a self-contained 90 minute lecture about it. The paper should be published in the last ten years. This seminar is for people interested in programming language and computer science education, so you should pick a paper published in either POPL or SIGSCE, see below.
- The slides of the talk must be submitted 48 hours before the presentation; otherwise, we will postpone the talk. Failing to submit the slides for a second time will result in an F (mittearvestatud).
- Additionally, you need to analyze two of the paper that are presented by other students. For your chosen papers, you should write a brief summary, including what you thought was interesting about the paper, and invent three relevant questions that you will ask the presenter.
Some theoretical papers may be hard, while some of the education papers may be softer, but what is critical is that you can sustain the audience's interest for 90 minutes. You may need to pick more than one paper if there isn't enough to say. On the other hand, if the paper is difficult, you should read up on previous work and present a subset that you fully understand. I will be deeply offended if you take a technical paper and just power-point through it.
Choosing your papers
You can access the ACM digital library using the university library:
- Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL)
- Technical Symposium on Computer science education (CSE)
The proceedings of the conferences are under the pane "Publication Archive", and in order to access the articles, you should then click on "Table of Contents". Note, the restriction to these conferences is not absolute. All SIGPLAN conferences and journals are probably fine. Again, the main concern is whether you can keep me interested for 90 minutes with sufficient technical detail and illustrative examples.
I want to implement something!
If you want to try the ideas in the paper, or maybe you just want do some practical work during this seminar. Well, we can register you to MTAT.03.272 (Programmeerimiskeelte uurimisprojekt / Special Assignment in Programming Languages). This provides an extra 3 ECTS credits for completing an independent task in the field of programming languages. Let me know if you are interested.