ComS 610-HR: Advanced Topics in Program Analysis

Advanced Topics in Program Analysis

Survey Requirements

The survey need to be in the ACM proceedings format, prepared using LaTeX. Please use the ACM SIG Alternate format for tighter results. I also make a template available on request.
For this survey I asked for two sections: introduction, and initial classification.
The introduction should describe the following in 1-2 pages, background for the area, briefly what aspect of the area would you like to survey? Why is the aspect of this area important to survey?
The initial classification would lay the foundations for the rest of the survey. What are the main categories along which the survey will divide the related work in the area ? Why these main categories? What are some approaches in each category based on your initial understanding?

How to Search for Related Papers ?

With the recent advance in web-based search, searching for related papers in computer science has become much easier. The best tool that I have come across for such search is the scholar service provided by Google Inc.. There are several interesting aspects of this service but here I will focus on how to look for papers for your survey.

If you decided to survey a topic, you probably would have read at least a paper on that topic. If not, ask your senior colleague, adviser, etc for a relevant paper on that topic. If this paper is a recent work, you should look into the related work section of that paper to find the oldest work that it cites and discusses as most relevant related work. This would perhaps be a good point to start your search. If on the other hand the paper that you have read is an older paper, start your search with that paper.

Related work search often oscillates, i.e. sometime you go forward to find the papers that have cited the current paper that you are considering and then you browse the related work section to find earlier work that has been referred to in the current paper. This process is repeated until you have reached a fixed point.

Google scholar service provides great assistance going forward It lists all papers that cite a given paper (to a reasonable approximation). This makes searching recent work much easier. Often the list of papers that cite a given paper is ordered by the number of times that they have been cited. So if you stop your search early on, you are likely to miss most recent work on the topic, that may not be cited so widely yet. The trick in this process is to separate wheat from chaff quickly. Based on title and abstract, you can generally tell if the citing paper is tangentially related to the cited paper.

Happy Searching!!