1. Prepare for ACET paper.
2. Summaries reading ....
2. Summaries reading ....
Monday, May 21, 2012
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Hints for PhD Defenses
At UNIKL, PhD defenses are generally not public, usually allows a student audience. Defenses consist of four parts: first, the candidate introduces themselves, then presents a summary of their work, interrupted and followed by questions from the committee. Finally, the committee meets in private to discuss the presentation and dissertation.While most of the committee will have read most of your thesis, you cannot assume that everyone has read every chapter.
The committee needs to be able to assess impact and depth. Usually, the committee has some idea of this before the defense, but whatever the student can say to make this assessment easier, perhaps just through emphasis, is likely to make the defense go much more smoothly.
Generally, the whole defense will not take more than two hours, but should take considerably less time. Part of the challenge of a defense is to convince the committee that you can summarize the important points of your work in a very limited time.
- Your presentation (and thesis) needs to address the following:
- What is the problem you are studying?
- Why is it important?
- What results have you achieved?
- Some committee members will want to know if the works has been published and where and how it was received. For example, if you have written software, indicate where it is being used, either for follow-on work or in some production or test environment.
- Have a list of your thesis-related publications as a slide. Indicate any awards that a paper may have received. For most people, it's easier to list some honor than "brag" about it in person.
- If you have presented your work in a conference or at job talks, be sure to anticipate and address the most common questions asked there.
- It's a nice gesture to provide snacks for the defense (coffee, bagels, cookies, fruit, etc.).
- The committee should be handed a copy of your slides.
- Be prepared to briefly summarize your background (undergraduate degree, how long at the university, etc.)
- No more than 30 slides, plus "back up" slides with additional material in case of questions. The most effective way of making your committee members mad is to come unprepared with a stack of 80 slides and then madly skip through them.
- Number your slides, particularly if one of your committee members is linked in via speakerphone. Consider using some kind of remote presentation software.
- List your contributions early.
- When presenting your contributions, be sure to use "I" and not "we" so that the committee will know what aspects of the work where yours, and which were group projects.
- Keep discussions of related work very brief, but be prepared to answer questions of the "how does this differ from so-and-so's work" succinctly.
- You will not be asked to prove results again.
- Be prepared to back up any comparative statement with facts, in particular statements like "works better", "faster", "scalable" or "optimal". If you are presenting a protocol, how do you know that it works correctly?
- If you have multiple parts in your dissertation, consult with the committee ahead of time as to whether it makes sense to omit some of them for the presentation.
Hints for Dissertations
- It is better to focus deeply on a single area then to work on several topics, each of which is pursued to a moderate depth.
- Systems work must be coupled with implementation and some kind of numerical comparitive analysis to demonstrate the improvements from existing or alternate approaches.
- Your thesis needs a one page executive summary that a layperson should be able to understand. Test: give it to a relative of yours that does not have an engineering degree...
Miscellaneous Hints
- You are likely only to defend a PhD thesis only once; your defense is a special occasion, so consider dressing appropriately, at least business casual, but a suit is not inappropriate.
- It is customary to provide refreshments for the audience, such as coffee, bagels, cookies and fruit, depending on the time of day.
Checklist for Dissertation
Before you submit your draft to the committee, be sure to verify that you have done the following checks:- Spell check;
- Check for missing chapter or figure references;
- Section, Chapter, Figure are capitalized;
- All references converted from [1][2][3] to [1,2,3];
- Consistent capitalization in captions;
- Verify expansion of all abbreviations at first instance;
- Avoid "tremendous", "huge" and other similar adjectives;
- End to end -> end-to-end;
- Check references for capitalization of abbreviations and missing data such as page numbers.
PhD study
PhD students often worry about whether their research will be good enough for a PhD. It's useful to remember the criteria which most universities have at the core of their PhD assessment: 'original work' which makes 'a significant contribution to knowledge'. It is no coincidence that most refereed journals and conferences use similar criteria - such publications are notionally how the research community communicates and continues to build knowledge. Therefore, you can provide evidence of 'significance', 'originality' and 'contribution to knowledge' in advance of submission of your thesis by publishing your work in refereed journals or conferences. There is more on this at various places later in this book. You don't need to make a major discovery to get a PhD - you just need to show that you're able to do good enough research independently.
Key dissertation ingredients
A number of ingredients are essential for a satisfactory dissertation:
- A thesis: one coherent over-riding 'story' or argument that embodies a research insight
- Situation in existing knowledge: a critical review of prior research which motivates and justifies the research question
- Contribution of something new (the 'significant contribution to knowledge')
- Appropriate voice and argument: the provision of clear and explicit evidence, substantiation and chain of inference
What is a 'significant' contribution?
Most students, when they hear the phrase ‘significant contribution’, think in terms of a new theory, crucial experiments, technological breakthroughs- the stuff of Nobel Prizes. For a PhD, the truth is that 'significant' need not mean 'revolutionary' or 'major' or even 'large'. The phrase might be more accurately read as 'significant - albeit modest - contribution'.
Characterizing your contribution means answering 'So what?', which means articulating:
- The importance of the question (Why is it worth asking?)
- The significance of the findings (Why should anyone care? Why do they matter?)
- Their implications for theory
- The limitations to generalization
What sorts of contribution are typically made in dissertations?
- Re-contextualization of an existing technique, theory or model (applying a technique in a new context, testing a theory in a new setting, showing the applicability of a model to a new situation): showing it works - or that it doesn't - and why
- Corroboration and elaboration of an existing model (e.g. evaluating the effects of a change of condition; experimental assessment of one aspect of a model)
- Falsification or contradiction of an existing model, or part of one
- Drawing together two or more existing ideas and showing that the combination reveals something new and useful
- Demonstration of a concept: showing that something is feasible and has utility (or showing that something is infeasible and explaining why it fails)
- Implementation of theoretical principle: showing how it can be applied in practice; making concrete someone else's idea, and hence showing how it works in practice and what its limitations are
- Codification of the 'obvious': providing evidence about what 'everyone knows' (possibly providing evidence that received wisdom is incorrect)
- Empirically-based characterization of a phenomenon of interest (e.g. detailed, critical, analytic account of the evolution of an idea; detailed analytic characterization of a crucial case study or a novel chemical compound, or a new planet)
- Providing a taxonomy of observed phenomena
- Well-founded critique of existing theory or evidence (e.g. correlating the results of a number of existing studies to show patterns, omissions or etc.)
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
CC Vs DC
Comparison Between Continuous
Control and Discrete Control
|
||
Comparison Factor
|
Continuous Control in Process Industries
|
Discrete Control in Discrete Manufacturing
Industries
|
Typical measures of product
output
|
Weight measures, liquid volume measures,
solid volume measures
|
Number of parts, number of
products
|
Typical quality measure
|
Consistency concentration of
solution, absence of contaminants, conformance to specification
|
Dimension , surface finish
appearance absence of defects product reliability
|
Typical variables and
parameters
|
Temperature, volume flow rate,
pressure
|
Position, velocity, acceleration,
force
|
Typical Sensors
|
Flow meters, thermocouples,
pressure sensors
|
Limit switches, photoelectric
sensors, strain gages, piezoelectric sensors
|
Typical actuators
|
Valves, heaters, pumps
|
Switches, motors, pistons
|
Typical process time constants
|
Seconds, minutes, hours
|
Less than s second
|
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)