 So how advanced are you in preparation towards that seminar? It is March 1st week that means two-third of the semester is practically over or at least half. So have you already completed your literature survey? Have you started? Ah, not that. So someone who said yes, can you define what exactly have you done? Can you say you have started? Somebody? Okay, how many of you have started working on your seminar? Ah, there was a loud yes. Okay, so the last man, can you tell us what exactly you have done so far? So you have read, you said you have read many research papers. The key areas of research. Can you define many? I mean there is one, two, three infinity if you know, one, two, three infinity of the book in my childhood. By the way, although I am having a dialogue with him, please consider this discussion to be generic enough because this happens with all of us and that's the point I wanted to make. So how did you pick up these four papers? A, the guide told you that these are the references you should read. B, you search. So to start your literature survey, a good starting point is, your guide tells you that look, there is a lot of literature here. This is one paper, which can be the starting point. So you read that research paper. Ah, whether you understand that research paper completely or not is not very relevant but you should understand the gist of what that paper says. But more importantly, that paper would in turn have a whole lot of references. Now how many references did that paper have? 35 references. And yet you choose only three of these. So no, that is okay but how did you choose these three? So only about 12 are relevant. Yet you chose to study three. So was the choice decided by the fact that these three were easily available on the net or in the library? No. So how? Okay. Let's take some other case study from this side. So how many of you have started working towards your seminars? One, two, this is very funny. Initially when I asked there were about 50 hands raised. Now when I am asking you to define what do you mean by having started, now suddenly only one or two, there is a confident hand at the back. Yeah, topic is answer extraction from query. You might help our friend there who went just by the three top searches. So depends on what query he asked maybe or he just looked at those references. But can you elaborate? So did you also get a list of papers from your guide to look at? So how many references were there in each of the two papers? One five. In each? How many overlapping? 15 plus 15 instead of 30 they were 20 or 25. So you had a total of 22 references. Now did you search for all of them? So how many papers did you actually look at? 10 papers. You selected 10 more or less looking at the title. Deciding that this would become, this would be available. So these 10 papers have you studied or you are still in the process of studying them? So you read abstracts and decided that 4 to 5 were not relevant. So the remaining five were relevant. So now have you read these five or you are in the process of reading them? Out of five you have read two. You found them to be relevant? Would you agree friends that in general if I as an M.Tech or Ph.D. student approach the initial job of literature survey more or less I would tend to do one of these two things or something similar to this. There is nothing wrong in this. In fact when you listen to Professor Sanna Murthy's talk the first talk is actually important because it tells you how to read a research paper and the talk certainly does not suggest that you should read only abstract and conclusion. I have underlined three things here is the third one. Title, abstracts and conclusion. You might not all say this explicitly but roughly these are the three things that anybody will first look at. What should it tell us is that when we write the title of our seminar report when we write the abstract and when we write the conclusions how careful we have to be. In my experience of 40 years whether it is seminar report or M.Tech stage one, stage two report the meat of the report is always ready it goes through some iterations at least the abstract and conclusion nobody writes till end and that gets written hurriedly. Forget the English language mistakes so creep in but the abstract and the conclusions often do not capture the essence of the work and the reason is not that you are not aware of those but the fact that you did not plan to give adequate time to write these two things. These are the smallest paragraphs in the entire report you will agree and they are the most difficult to write. I do not know whether I said this but Professor Prakash Vaidya wrote a message on my board when he saw a very long mail I had sent to someone he says I wanted to write a short letter but I did not have time so I wrote a long one. You realize the funny thing in this this is a fact writing something short like you wrote the summary and critique it would have taken you longer than if you were to write it as a story. So this happened but please remember that since the whole world like you will concentrate on looking at the title on the abstract and on the conclusions you better write them well. Having said this what is the record that you have kept of the papers which you have read not referred to in your report that will come later what is the written record that you have? You have downloaded those papers you have access to full papers you are obviously not read full papers suppose later on you decide to choose one paper as our friend seems to have done for a few two papers maybe you have read and they may get referred to cited in his reference in his seminar report. How long will it take physical time to describe the citation correctly in his own section on references and bibliography should be 30 seconds at that time when you are submitting your report or wanting to submit your report. Please understand what I am saying you have written the complete seminar report or the stage one report and you are compiling the bibliography or you are compiling the references at the end. You have cited them somewhere appropriately while writing the thing one two three four five six and you have to write. It appears to be the extremely silly activity it should be done just like that it indeed gets done just like that meaning the details which are required in the citation are rarely complete in each and every reference. So, how many of you are familiar with the citation rules which are followed let us say in either IEEE or ACM or department of computer science standards. How many of you have read the specifications of writing a seminar report or writing a mtextage one report. It is available in the department. You have read that? One person. Why? Okay. So, let me explain why I would also probably do the same thing and that is based on the mistaken assumption that first I have to complete my work then only I will start writing it and when I start writing it I will bother about the format. Is that right? Because the writing stage has not yet come. That is where the problem is after I complete my work then I forget that I have forgotten to I forget that I have forgotten to see that description therefore I start writing and then just few days before either a colleague of mine or my guide tells me this is not as per the department of format you would have to write it like that and then I go back there and then I suddenly find amongst other thing that references have to be written in a specific fashion. So, since you have read that can you tell us exactly how a reference is cited if you recall that. Okay. Number of chapters or sections or whatever but you do not know how for example if in some text I have said let us say the such is a sentence which appears in my writer the book by Ders Ders is the Chancellor of Buckley University those of you have heard him he has written an extremely interesting book on how the he calls it the scandal in India and the building of the British Empires very interesting book but forget that so I have given this reference now somewhere in my last portion of my report I will be writing references and I will be writing one two three four like this where I have used one two three four as citation I could use the year of publication some short name there and arrange these on alphabetical order or whatever or order of appearance or order of appearance in my report or order of appearance in the literature either the small point I am saying is how do I write what do I write here you have read research papers some you have read references apparently because from the reference only you find another reference how many of you remember how exactly was that reference written in any other paper now you have you seem to be much familiar with this let's understand from yeah so one is title then name of the author is that correct no no no is the sequence correct do the authors come first or do the title come first so there is a convention it doesn't matter you write in one way but since there is a convention that needs to be followed and that needs to be understood and appreciate so it has to sink in our minds actually anytime either I am quoting a reference or I am reading a reference without somebody telling me that this is author this is title I should automatically see that that's the advantage of everybody following that convention alright so is there a general agreement that the names of the names of the author should come before the title okay fine then title next so publication I will say sometimes year and place is also written it is not optional it is not optional if the year of publication or time of publication is not written it's an academic crime crime do you understand crime so if you find a reference like that somebody has been as sloppy as we generally are why is it relevant because that date of publication tells me whether this material belongs to a time period before much of the work happened or it belongs to a latest occurrence or it is somewhere in between that year immediately gives me a signal in my mind about the relevance of that work unless it's a very old paper but a seminal paper a seminal paper is one which has maximum impact on the field it starts a new theme somewhere then such papers could be fifteen hundred sixteen hundred seventeen hundred doesn't matter in fact if a very old paper is cited in the literature you can actually assume that to be a seminal paper so the year of publication is not sometimes written many of you might have this this notion it is always to be time so and if it is a conference then usually if it is one of the recent conferences or whatever you generally also write the month if it is a journal publication you write the issue number volume ok what else if it is a printed publication it is common to write page numbers if it's a book you may say just chapter or section or whatever is only the name of the publication written or publisher is also written so enough details about it anything else sorry so can you explain what is a so it tells you what so it tells you what ok there could be other numbers such as ISBN there could be other classifications the moral of this entire long story is that this entire thing you would expect to find in any reference obviously therefore this entire thing in a suitable format has to be written by you in the references that you would list agreed now the main question when you read those papers any one single paper also do you always note down these details about that paper note down or type somewhere there you don't take it from me you don't I did when I was a student till my research guide fired me once in those days there were no computers we used to have index pages we had to carry those index pages to library and I used to carry a notebook he took that notebook and kept it with him and gave me a set of index pages and he says this is how you will write the literature that you survey so it would have exactly these things I am talking about 1972-73 I had to write these and I had to read the index card was a sort of page full of things I had to write the complete abstract that was written there by my own hands the advantage he mentioned I said I am reading it so I understand it he says no you should write it down because you should read and write and that goes into your mind so you will remember the abstract most of the abstract practically forever and since you have written the name of the author the name of the journal etc etc your mind can correlate the occurrence of that name and that abstract much later as well this was the discipline that was you are now computers so what happens is you have access to information very easily but because you have access to information you have perhaps forgotten to organize that information properly as you deal with it because later on you will have to spend much more time in re-looking please understand that the reference to a paper cannot easily be constructed from the paper itself if you have downloaded a research publication it will of course have the title it will have authors where will you find where this paper was published in some papers you would find it in the bottom line IEEE, Journal, whatever but in some papers in the web you won't find that if if it's a manuscript submitted you won't find any reference at all will you find the year the publisher, the conference where it was held, the month the page number of the proceeding you may not find that even though you have a full paper with you so to assume that I have these 20 papers downloaded which I have used in my research and therefore in my report I can easily cite them is an incorrect notion believe me when you have three days to submit your report you have these 20 papers with you but your reference page will look obnoxiously bad you may wonder why I am spending so much time on such a small thing these small things together make the big hole and I am mentioning that small thing already in the really is left out by you most of the other things you would be capable of looking at, writing, we are looking at how to write properly etc in a separate issue so will you please do that now before it is too late whatever papers you have studied I still feel that although I also use computers as heavily as you do now but I still feel like writing down a few lines on a page, I may not refer to that page later but I have found that the act of writing enforces memory to some extent but of course different people would have different style, in any case whether on a computer or elsewhere there is absolutely no excuse for all of you not to have this information about each and every paper that you read collated separately and kept separately as a growing list then you can pick up whichever you want and it would be nice if you could link those to the abstracts please understand that if you have downloaded papers, you have downloaded what may be 20 papers as someone said these 20 papers will exist as 20 different files now I want to quickly peruse the abstracts of these 20 papers I will have no way out except to open each file look at the abstract, keep it in mind, close it, open another file look at the abstract etc don't you think it would be useful if these 20 abstracts were just cut and pasted in a single file with these kind of references so what I was told to do by hand in those days you can automate that process to some extent and create a single document which is some kind of a reference sheet for you which would contain the reference in exactly this fashion and just below it it will contain the abstract which is there from the and now you would have all the abstracts there and I would recommend one more thing, when you write the list of such 20 abstracts or 30 abstracts you might want to put some keywords many times you will find the keywords as a requirement in most of the recent publications earlier publications did not have that and these keywords need not be the standard keywords which are published but the keywords which pertain to your work so you are looking at let's say some broad area and you have some 4, 5 or 6 attributes around which you want to hunt for the research papers then along with the reference you might just write this keyword, this keyword, this keyword so for you the quick search is better in general as somebody pursuing PhD who is supposed to do a much more exhaustive literature survey he might, he or she might read some hundred abstracts before coming down and remember as the number increases beyond 5 its organization becomes difficult so I would suggest that you should do that in any case the point is that you must write the references correctly and you cannot do that easily at the end unless you have noted them down in the first place now this is an exercise that I would like you to do I will be discussing with Professor Prakash Vaidya the work that you will do in the next two lectures because next two lectures I am not here I am in Berkeley attending a conference online education so Professor Prakash Vaidya will handle some assignment but one assignment which I would like you to do which is strictly pertaining to your own literature survey related activities for your own seminar how many of you are not doing a seminar this semester not doing a seminar are you doing any other formal activity like some R and D project or stage one or or something like that is there any other formal thing nothing so you do not have to write anything in this whole semester except the exams is it very what should I say fortunate lot they do not have any work so how do we go about it then because this activity that I am going to suggest pertains to the literature survey if you are not required to do any literature survey alright I will give you a task that will be actually longer than the that will take longer than the other people do a literature survey on MOOCs how many of you are not doing any seminar can you raise hands again 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and approximately 5 more from those who are absent right so about 20 people I would not like you to waste a lot of your time but if each one of you can just glance through the MOOCs please remember I am not specifying any special activity or concentration MOOCs is massive open online courses whatever material you come to your mind do a blind search but each one of you get down some 4 or 5 references okay and just glance through those abstracts and write one or two keywords but write the references properly just this task nothing else you are not required to study those papers thoroughly or something like that okay if you can actually download, cut and paste abstracts and form a glowing list I will be thankful you will benefit from that this is a method and these 20 people could form a group could somebody offer to coordinate activities of this group they are not very heavily loaded this semester no coordination is difficult Firuja can you coordinate alright so all such people please send an email to her she will make a group of all those people in the moodle and then she will make a sort of submission thing where you can just upload it and she will coordinate so let us these 20 of us let us undertake an exercise of doing a literature survey ourselves and using that to explain to our other colleagues in the class how good literature survey is done and reported would we like to take the challenge none of you will have to do anything you will have to only look at the references cut and paste the abstracts write the references properly and submit your tasks then Firuja and I will do the literature sir and we will present that literature survey to everyone how do you like that idea when I say Firuja and I will do the literature survey it actually means she will do the literature survey and I will take part of the credit you agree Firuja so this is what we will do now I need to leave now because I have but I will request professor Prakash Vaidya to just try and outline the kind of activities of correction work that is going to be you have done some correction work for their submissions so that statistics would you like to present today or next lecture next lecture now in that case let us use these there has been a mishap in the family and I have to rush to Pune but we still have about 10 more minutes 12 more minutes so let us spend these 12 more minutes in listening to your endeavours in technical communication now we are coming to technical communication not generic communication so any questions or any doubts that you have or any comment that you would like to make on effective communication from your side communicate see when I ah so he is telling you roughly the same thing that I am suggesting ok is there a methodology that you use in creating the google doc so this is a good technique he is suggesting that create a google doc in advantage of google doc you can also share it with people so things become automatic good point anything else that somebody would like to observe he seems to have done something concrete so far towards his seminar whereas others appear to have appear to be claiming that they have started are they right I must of course I have nothing to do with your research seminars your guides and you are capable of handling that but as it occurs to an outsider let me suggest to you very politely that the semester started in the first week of January and we are in the first week of March two full months have gone and the month of April half of it at least is end same exam what is your submission date for seminars now I understand you are all waiting for the department to announce the submission date then the activity will start so how like a typical IIT the life has not changed in 45 years that I can remember so that's ok but I would I would suggest that you need not wait for such an announcement please start now because independent of what you do in your seminar your assignment submissions here depend very much on your working on your research seminar you won't be able to submit the assignments here proper unless you work ok so one assignment is going to be as I said I will provide the links so will not waste the lecture times in listening to process but you should listen to her lectures outside there are two lectures as I said one on how to read a research paper and second on how to conduct a literature survey both these lectures in my opinion are good for you at this juncture itself since many of you have not started on so those links will be put up by tonight or tomorrow morning because I will be back only late night so tomorrow morning first thing will be there right the third set of lectures I would like you to look at those of you are serious about it is there are lectures did I mention these lectures earlier in the course no Professor Sripath Karmalkar is a professor of electrical engineering at IIT Madras and for several years he has been giving talks on how to do research we had invited him Professor Sachin Patwardhan of chemical engineering had invited him here to talk to our research scholars how many of you are research scholars PhD students here a large number so all of you have seen these lectures or no you are not those were absolutely extraordinary lectures covering all topics of introduction to research how to do research what kind of problems you face how to do rigorous experimentation how to resolve arguments and fights between you and your guide how to resolve depression issues all kinds of things excellent lectures so I had got those lectures recorded then and requested him whether he could release them in open source he agreed later on we conducted a program for 10,000 teachers training them on to research methodology introduction to research methodology and we again invited Professor Karmalkar to come and repeat those six lectures because teachers in engineering colleges you would know you would many of you would come from large number of engineering colleges where not all teachers have done PhDs many in fact are actually registered in working so to introduce them to research we had organized this course and all those lecture now are recorded topper videos and those videos exist on the enemy ICT website so remember to include that website also okay the reference to that those lectures are downloadable you can download them they are released in open source and you can actually listen I would strongly suggest that all research scholars would find it very very useful to listen to his lectures there is a complete course of many two weeks and lot of other lectures by other people but his lectures introduction to research lectures I think there are five or six lectures absolutely top to us and very useful and I would suggest that even for empty students who actually at the end of first year are getting into the beginning of their research because your research project will start now might find it useful some of you have time might just listen to them now some of you do not have time now might listen to them in Mejoo when you actually start your project so that you will find very useful Professor Sripath Karmalkar so both these links will keep there any other query or observation nobody has a question on effective communication okay some observation some comment so I am not asking you to ask a question make some comment your technically is statistically proven how do you say that he is saying that when we have not done much work we remain highlighting the class but when we do some work we are happy to present you recall when I asked for submissions and then I requested for presentation people without any hesitation came here and made presentation because they had actually worked so what he is observing is when I have work then I hesitate in communicating that is what he means by saying statistically proven but the last five minutes I am not asking you to say anything about any work that you should have done nothing just general comments on effective communication you have no comment to make any weakness that you perceive any suggestion that you have anything no observation I have to pick up someone to say okay okay you lady you say something whatever comes to your mind whatever comes to your mind doesn't matter and tell us a story for example no her she is being shy that's why I want her to speak yeah I wonder do you hesitate so much when you are in a group and there is some something going on and you are asked to contribute you are asked to say something do you hesitate so much before opening your mouth among your friends no they are all your friends you can include me in a moment why is it taking so long to just make any observation okay you can speak on anything under the sun and even beyond because sun controls only this part of the solar system any quick observation somebody I I am surprised that people hesitate in speaking okay can you say something yeah you no no you only say something oh I am delighted to find a human being among us who has nothing to say you are so happy with the world or you are so unhappy with the world this is too extreme you would have something isn't there anybody in the class something to say yes you would like to say something sorry parable of key okay so can you just elaborate in two sentences on that did you hear about he has stated some very profound things about the philosophy of knowledge how many of you have read this parable one two three four not bad come again in the class of philosophy oh the fine but shouldn't we be glad that people actually remember a few things about what happens in a class now that is very effective communication I would say okay alright we have one more minute but I will tell you something this is not on you will have to speak now since you speak better you present better when it is in the context of an assignment please take this down as an assignment next two sessions they will conduct but before that I would like you to read both the lectures by you should have seen them but on the session on is it 13th of March right 13th of March session I will be inviting people to speak I will be selecting people randomly to speak on anything of their choice for three minutes no slides no write up no nothing they will have to speak three minutes and I will choose people randomly so you are almost ten days to prepare on what you want to say in those three minutes completely open ended you can tell a short story okay the only thing you are not permitted to do is come here and stand like this for three minutes without speaking you will have to speak is that okay with you fine so that is an assignment prepare for it thank you so much