Things to remember when writing a paper

Writing:

• Think more about the structure first.
• Latex Macros for common terms don't help much
• Describe Figures, so that they can be looked at without looking into the Text.
• Be more verbose than you think
• Give commonly used mathematical terms a name to refer to - don't repeat the formula

Distributed Writing:

• Use Subversion to control text even if the others don't know how to use it.
• Use one paragraph one line format. This captures the semantics what you are doing the best.
• Make it visible in on the paper which revision the text belonged to
• latexdiff is a good tool to find out differences about submissions. Take care of people who don't know what a linebreak or a carrige return are.
• Spellcheck before every commit
• Chapters (big document parts) in different files. (good for collaboration)

Experiments:

• Data Organization
• Keep data and derived data (for the experiments) appart
• Keep task data (preprocessed queries) apart from task results (rankings)
• Keep all scripts in one place
• Visualize the Data Flow
• Note EVERYTHING down
• Think first about what you want to show
• Then choose the parameters you want to display
• Pay attention to parameters in which you are not interested, but which are still freely choosable.
• Choose way of display (table, Histogram, Line / Point Plot)
• Perform the experiment first with a small but representative Dataset to see approximate Results
• Perform full experiments
• Check experiments (results for all queries etc)
• Create Graphs
•  

Submission preparation (1 Week before)

• Create account in yet another conference tool.
• Upload abstract and affiliation

Check before submission:

• Anonymousness: Check own references and mentioning in text.
• Spell Check (convert to rtf and then in word)
• Conference requirements met (Template etc)
• Graphs have X and Y axis labeled
• Figure / Table captions coherent state.
• Hanging Lines (Lines or Headings being isolated from the rest on the end or start of a page / column)
• Check Reference for completeness
• Remove Subversion comments
• Check Coherence of enumeration styles (1) 2) Third...
• Check all identifiers ($n$) etc are described
• Sections are listed in introduction & Subsections at the beginning of each section (not necessarily)
• Title spelled correctly (double check!)

Camera Ready Version

• Authors / Affiliation / Title spelled correctly (double check!)
• Copy Bibliography / external tex files into paper folder (so that they don't get changed anymore). Alternatively, paste .bbl file into .text

Cleaning Phase:

• Delete Unnecessary Data
• If time permits, also delete intermediate data and redo the whole experiment
• Backup the whole Experiment Folder (.tex, plots, sources, data, scripts, binaries...)
  You might run the experiment on newer hardware / software for your thesis, but there might be changes which screw your results!

Adjustment of Aims

Future Aims in my PHD:

• Short Term (Till Summer)
• Assesment of Detectors (Improve through co-occurrence)
• Improve P(Ci|R)
  
• Integration of ASR output (Laurens, Marijn and me)
  
• Work on Database (Ander: uncertain Data) (CIKM)
  
• Platform development
• Mid Term (Till Autumn)
  
• Evaluation Buisiness (SIGIR)
  
• Internship Abroad (Yahoo / Google / Microsoft / CMU / City Uni Dublin)
  Better late Winter 2008. Take action Summer
  
• Teaching (parallel)
  
• Master Thesis Supervisor
  
• Supervision (Slaves?) (Browsing Tool)
  

Thesis Title: Information Retrieval on Uncertain Data