CS260r Final Paper Guidelines
CS260r - Topics in Computer Systems - Fall 2006

Your final paper for the course is due at 11:59pm EST on January 8, 2007. No late papers will be accepted. Please e-mail the paper as an attachment (not a link) in PDF format to mdw@eecs.

The final paper for the course is intended to be a conference-style paper, much like the papers you have been reading all semester. It should include the same general structure (abstract/intro/related work/system architecture/implementation/evaluation/future work/conclusions) as these other papers. Of course, depending on your project, the exact structure may vary.

The paper should be written for a scientific audience of experts in the field of computer systems. In other words, it should present your research in the same manner as you would expect to see in a conference such as SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, etc. The idea behind this is to give you practice writing conference papers, and hopefully we will be able to actually submit your paper to one of these conferences in the coming months (the SOSP and Sensys deadlines are in March, for example). If you are interested in this, I am happy to work with you to refine your paper for submission.

As with all conference papers, you must follow a set of formatting guidelines. I am not going to pull out a ruler to check your margins, etc. but if you seriously abuse these general guidelines then you run the risk of making the reviewers (i.e., me) unhappy.

• Papers must be between 10 and 12 pages long, including all text, figures, references, etc.

• Papers must be submitted in PDF format. No other formats will be accepted (no Word, HTML, or PostScript). It is your responsiblilty to ensure that your paper prints correctly. The paper will be printed in black and white, so be sure if you use color in your figures that they can be read in black and white.

  I strongly recommend the use of pdflatex to generate your paper. A template for writing papers using this tool can be downloaded here: template.tar.gz This template has the appropriate formatting, layout, etc. for final papers for the course. (It also happens to be the same format used by many conference papers.)

  If you use regular TeX or LaTeX, you can use dvips and pstopdf to generate a PDF file, but I find that the results are often unsatisfying. At least use the times package (\usepackage{times}), which causes Adobe's standard fonts to be used, yielding much better results.

  If you wish to use another tool, the following PDF file is an example of the formatting that I expect for papers in this course: regions-hotnets03.pdf

• Your document should be double column, use 10-point font, single-spaced. (Footnotes, captions, bibliographic entries, etc. can use a smaller font, but it must be legible.) The left and right margins should be 1/2 inch; and top and bottom margins should be 1 inch. You should use two-column formatting with 1/3 of an inch between columns. Generally, your paper should be visually appealing and easy to read.

• Email the course staff if you have any questions!