New Developments in PETS

Deadline: The final reports are due on 21 Feb, 2025.

Submission Format: Please use the USENIX two-column paper format for your final report submission.

Final reports are expected to be between 5 - 8 pages long (excluding references) in the USENIX format. While the page range is broad, we do not grade on length.  Please keep in mind quality over quantity.

Below is a template for what your final report should look like:

(M) Abstract (100 - 250 words)
(M) Introduction (1 - 2 pages)
    Motivation and shortcomings of current solutions
(O) Background (1 page)
    This is to provide details on relevant tools or systems to contextualize your project if required
(M) Related Work (1 - 2 pages)
    Summary of relevant related systems, solutions, and papers that you read over the duration of the course for your research
(M) System/Solution Design (2 - 3 pages)
    Describe your solution in detail. Use figures or algorithms (or both)
(O) Experiments/Evaluation (1 - 2 pages)
(M) Conclusion

M denotes sections that should absolutely be a part of everyone's report.
O denotes optional sections that may be a part of your final report.

This should give you a high-level overview of what your final report should look like, and establish some *must-be-part-of-every-final-report* sections.  

That said, there is no one recipe or template for an excellent final report. Consequently how you choose to order and present your report in the end is completely up to you. (But do make sure the (M) sections are addressed even if under a different name)

We will continue to hold office hours until 19th Feb, 2025. So feel free to reach out and schedule meetings with us if you want to discuss anything about your research or report.

We will also allow for an early submission of your final reports.  If you submit them before the 10th February, 2025; we will review them and provide feedback to help you improve the quality of your final submission. We strongly encourage you to take advantage of this.

Hello Everyone,

For the final presentation, please prepare a 12-14min long presentation and calibrate for 6-8min question time. Overall, we have allocated at most 20 min per group.

Please keep in mind the feedback you received from the first presentation. In particular, keep in mind (i) that the audience is/might not be familiar with the topic you are presenting and (ii) it might be better to choose what you want to focus on: too many details might be detrimental to the story.

If you have the presentation deck ready a bit before, we would be happy to give you feedback on it.

As also mentioned in our previous post, please let us know if you’d like to register for Jan 29th.

Finally, after your presentation we will schedule meetings to give you feedbacks and guide you for the next steps towards the final report.

All the best with the preparation. 

Best, 

We hope everyone is making progress on their research projects. Please don’t hesitate to ask for time with us to get feedback on your current ideas.

[Volunteers for presenting Jan 29] We are looking for volunteers to present their work in the first week (Jan 29 instead of Feb 5). Please let us know by Wednesday 15 if you want to volunteer. Otherwise we will go ahead and randomly assign groups.

[Course Evaluation] We hope you all enjoy the course so far, but we’d like to get your feedback as well so we can keep improving the course. The course evaluation link can be found in the Materials -> General Materials Section. We’d really like all of you to fill out this evaluation; please do so by January 26, 2025. (If too few of you do so, the results will not be available to us.) If you have any other feedback / comments / requests that do not fit this form, please write us an email.

We’re looking forward to seeing the results of your projects,

- Sajin, Sylvain, and Wouter