INFSCI 3350: Doctoral Seminar
Fall 2016


Course Overview

The goal of the Doctoral Seminar is to familiarize doctoral students with tools and enable them to practise skills they need towards their Ph.D. dissertation and for research. This includes - getting to know good sources of literature, understanding and critically assessing the research literature, independently learning new analytical and experimental techniques, presenting technical material both tutorial in nature and with a narrower scope of research, selecting topics of interest and doing original technical work on it, and developing the ability to see the relationships between seemingly disconnected pieces of work. We accomplish this in this doctoral seminar through detailed review of a set of papers representative of the state of the art in Internet of Things . We will scan papers spanning a spectrum of issues related to this topic to familiarize the doctoral student with interesting research issues in this area.

Focus of this Seminar

The focus of this doctoral seminar will be specifically on information/network security issues in IoT, although the applications aspect of IoT will be considered in context. (e.g., health oriented IoT may have specific research challenges that are different from smart cities). This may involve data analytics, privacy, and network science related research issues.



Class Format

Students will present assigned/selected papers. Usually there will be one to two presentations per class. The presentation should be structured to fit into a 60 or 30 minute time slot. Each student will write a critical review of the paper they present, discussing it's contribution, limitations and possible extensions. A sample review form is available here. There will be a midterm exam (based on all the material covered) and a final project. About a month and a half into the seminar, students will start presenting material related to progress in their project. Details will be given in the first class.

Grading

  • Midterm: 20 %
  • Reviews: 10 %
  • Class participation: 15 %
  • Class presentation: 15 %
  • Final Project: 40 %

Office Hours: By appointment

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