Useful information when participating in a seminar

Literature research

Publications are the backbone of science and a good literature research will be the backbone for your participation in a seminar. Without good literature it will be hard to give a talk and write a document since you have no content.

1. First of all you have to find literature for your topic. Here you will find a useful collection of sites to search and download literature. The TUM Library offers free access for students to many of the premium services of these sites (e.g. downloading, view full document).
2. Once you have found something you have to rate its quality. What kind of document did you find (jounal, conference paper, workshop paper)? What is the quality of the journal/conference? Who is the author (other publication, citation count, private company employee/research institute employee)? Who is the publisher (trustworthy like IEEE, ACM, Springer, Elsevier, Wiley)? What is the count of citations of the document (> 1000 'must read' (mostly books), > 100 should be read, < 100 might still be interesting)? If possible try to avoid to cite websites (Wikipedia etc.). If you have to cite a website, add the last time you successfuly accessed the website.
3. Manage your literature, even if it's only for this seminar. Once you have downloaded serveral dozen papers it is easy to loose the overview. There are many open source and freeware tools out there to help you do this. One easy to use and plattform independent tool is JabRef or the OS X specific one BibDesk.

Give a talk

An example with instructions can be found here: How to do a presentation

More guidelines can be found here: Hans Obermaier: Tips zur Gestaltung eines Seminarvortrags. HU Berlin, 1994. http://www.dbis.informatik.hu-berlin.de/lehre/wissenswertesvorlagen/seminarvortraege.html

For presentations at this chair please use this template: PowerPoint master

Write a document

There are many WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors out there. For scientific documents we strongly recommend LaTeX, a WYWIWYG (What You Want Is What You Get) editor system. It is a scripting language where you can produce highly professional looking documents with just a few commands and Our LaTeX template. It also works great with the literature databases produced by BibTex, JabRef or other programs. There is a good Latex Installation Package proTeXt for Windows, which includes MikeTex and TeXnicCenter. On Mac OS you should use TexShop.