Recently, I was invited as a judge at paper presentation contest (ADSOPHOS) by CSE department, MJCET.  It was my first experience as an external judge and a good one too. I wanted to share with you some of the experiences I had in terms of judging the papers and presentations of the students.

The following were the four metrics that I was considering while judging the papers.

1. Student’s contribution to the paper

2. Technical knowledge in that field

3. Presentation flow  

4. Student’s Attitude

While, I know one can come up with many more criterions, at that moment I could only think of these four.

Student’s Contribution to the paper:

The essence behind writing a paper is to present a new idea before the world.  Somehow, because of our inability to produce many new ideas from last two thousand years, we don’t actually stress about it to the students. I know it’s unfortunate that we haven’t contributed much to the science from many centuries but now it’s the time. We constitute more than one-sixth of the world population and it’s our moral responsibility to constitute at least one-sixth of the ideas that develop the world. Without a debate, let’s acknowledge the fact that we have done enough to be proud and let’s change that in future.  People come and go, but ideas remain forever. If you ask me, how can you expect a student to write about a new idea? Believe me, you can think of new ideas. It’s just that none of our ancestors have produced new ideas, so we don’t have that confidence. Sometimes, the time demand a change… the change is that you need to produce ideas.

To cut short the long story, yes, you need to contribute to the paper. Student’s contribution to the paper is the top priority in judging the best paper.  

Technical Knowledge in that field

While ideas can be great, they need to be presented in a way they can be appreciated and implemented. For example, “going to moon” is an idea but “how to go there” needs knowledge in astronomy, aerodynamics, extra-terrestrial communication, material science, etc.  So, when you write about an idea, you need to have knowledge in that field. Make sure that you read text-books and reference papers in that field as much as possible. While, presenting a paper, your knowledge in the field will help you in guiding your presentation in such a way that everyone understands it. You would also be able to defend your idea well.

Presentation flow:

The smooth flow of presentation is essential for people to understand your idea/paper. You should start with the objective of your paper, more towards a introduction, speak about your new idea and what you can achieve with that idea. There are many other ways, but you need to decide which flow suits your paper. You present a paper for 15 minutes and eventually if no one understands it, then what’s the use? If you are under an impression that if people don’t understand your paper, then you are great. I strongly suggest you to come out of that misconception.  

Student’s Attitude:

Your attitude while presenting the paper really matters. While some students present it very aggressively and so do it very calmly. But make sure that you retain to one state. Being aggressive sometimes and being calm at time won’t help. Another aspect of your attitude is how you respond back to the queries. When someone shows a flaw or asks something that you are not aware of, then speak up about it that “you don’t know” or say “you will get back to him/her after little more research”. Don’t brag about your idea while presenting the paper. It appears really stupid. You are presenting Science not politics!

The following are certain observations I had while judging the student papers.

Observations:

1. Unfortunately, the faculty members at colleges are not guiding students properly in preparing the papers. Students are not aware of abstract, references and basic formatting aspects of papers. A paper is not a greeting card where you do decorations, it’s a technical document. It needs to be formal.

2. Attitude of 90% of the students is not up to the mark. While, I don’t expect exceptional discoveries in every paper but it is expected that every paper is written by the student in his/her own words.  Do not simply copy word-to-word from internet. You need to re-write it in your own words and acknowledge the original researcher in your paper.  

3. Read text-books. While internet is useful, it’s yet to replace the text-books. I was sad at student’s papers with titles “Embedded systems” or “Nanotechnology”. These student’s needs to be educated that embedded systems or Nanotechnology was so large fields and paper title should be specific. And what was worse is that, these papers tend to be basic overview of embedded systems or nanotechnology, which is nothing but the first chapter of any standard textbooks in this particular field. That’s why I say, read the text-books first.

4. Too many claims without explanation. This is one of the worst things I have noticed among students. They tend to claim so many things outside context that they are not aware of. Whenever they present an idea, they tend to brag about it so much that it doesn’t appear scientific anymore. Do not brag about ideas. Use technical data to define terms like large, small, tiny, etc. 

5. Do not use photographs taken by foreigners. There was a paper on “Stenography” by some student and she extensively used photographs of American monuments demonstrate how secret information can be hidden within images. I don’t understand why students don’t apply some creativity. One can very well use images of India Gate or Taj Hotel to demonstrate the same. These are the small things that can really create an impact before judges.

6. Try to rehearse your presentation few times before your friends. Take their feedback. I have seen students presenting without any smooth flow. A smooth flow is essential while presenting a paper. This will enable audience including judges understand what you are presenting.

7. Highlight what you have done and what’s your objective. This is something in all the papers I have seen by the students. They keep speaking about the stuff done by someone else as if they have done and never speak about the stuff what they done. Even merely saying, I have reviewed following papers or I am presenting the ideas mentioned in these papers. And stating objectives such as, the objective of the papers is to make students aware of interesting developments in so and so fields. That sends out a strong statement about your honesty and attitude.

6 years back, I failed in the written entrance exam for engineering at IIT after crossing the initial screening test. To my surprise, I was given a marks sheet with “2 marks” in physics embedded on it.  I was given two options by the people around me, either move on in life or write the exam again next year. I created a third option. The next four years, I lived a life of a psychologically damaged person who thrashed IITs in very conference and public forum I visited. I knew, my anger on IITs was unjustified but I wanted to take on the best because I have to be better to take on the challenge. And as they say, people like the so called ‘underdog’ winning. During engineering I visited around 30 engineering colleges across India for presenting technical papers, presented 8 papers in International conferences and published two papers in journals. Not to mention, six of my papers were rejected by Nature and APS Review D. I also wrote a book on Unified theory of physics called “Cosmos Redefined”, which was later published by Cafet-Innova publications in 2008. Meanwhile, I also got an opportunity to work as Intern at Microsoft and subsequently after completion of my engineering - I joined Microsoft as full-time employee.

After joining Microsoft, I looked back at life and found it incredibly arrogant and entertaining. But soon, all the momentum died down and there I was one among the millions who worked hard to earn money. There were dreams of inventions, discoveries and Noble prizes and there was this harsh reality that said all of these are impossible now. Soon, the reality became my next and only enemy. For some reason, I felt that I should not take on this challenge. It was that coward in me that searched life within the horizons of compromises. The next one year, I underwent an identity crisis. From Bill Gates to Hugh Hefner, their lives fascinated me and propelled to do something. The crisis was so bad that I even thought of starting an Indian Playboy magazine. Days passed by, nothing worked out and gave me a chance to rethink about my life. What do I really want from my life? What is the one area that I want to focus on?

I needed a direction and focus in my scattered life. That’s when the idea of doing a PhD came. I want to do PhD neither for the sake of career nor for the sake of money but for sake of solace in life. I am looking forward to work on a profound challenge that either breaks me down or makes my identity. I have done my engineering in Electronics and Communication and had been involved quite bit with computer science from last two years. My area closest to my heart is theoretical physics. I want to work on a problem statement that combines all three of these areas to produce something phenomenal.

I also like to propose a problem statement that has fascinated me from last few months. In 2002, Yonina Chana and Alan Oppenheim from MIT published a paper on “Quantum Signal Processing”. While the idea was new in itself, it did not include all the quantum mechanical effects and relied heavily on classical signal processing. My idea is work on a theoretical framework of Quantum signal processing and computing and their implementation through quantum circuits. This would involve amalgamation of computer science principles, quantum mechanics and electronics.

I look forward for an exciting opportunity to do my PhD at XYZ either on my proposed statement or any other profound problem statement coined by the professors at XYZ.  

Appendix – I (My publications)

[1] Mohd Abubakr, R. M. Vinay, Novel Technique for Volatile Optical memory using solitons, Proc. of IEEE Third International Conference on Wireless and Optical Networks’06, Bangalore, India, 2006.

[2] Mohd Abubakr, Occurrence of Virtual Entanglement in Nano-CMOS logic, IEEE TENCON 06, Hong Kong, 2006.

[3]Mohd Abubakr, Frequency Analysis of Decoupling Capacitors for Three Voltage Supplies in SoC, Selected for IEEE International conference on Circuits & system for communications, China 2008. (arXiv:0710.3789v1 [cs.AR])

[4] Mohd Abubakr, R.M.Vinay Architecture for pseudo acausal evolvable embedded systems, Journal of engineering Students , Cafet Innova Publications 2007. (arXiv:0704.0985v1 [cs.NE])

 [5] Mohd Abubakr, Architecture for Dynamic Optical memory using solitons, 8^th International Conference on Optoelectronics, Fiber Optics and photonics, Hyderabad, India, 2006.

[6] RDSSSS Raju, Mohd Abubakr, T.Radhakrishna, A Numerical Technique for solving the Transcendental Equation Describing propagation of Light through an optical fiber, 8^th International Conference on Optoelectronics, Fiber Optics and photonics, Hyderabad, India, 2006.

[7] Mohd Abubakr, G. Satya, Digital Soliton Combinatorial Logic Gates in Optical Networks, Proc. of ICSCI’06, Vol-2, 256 – 259 (2006) 

[8] G.Satya, Mohd Abubakr, M.Rajesh, Analysis of Freehand Drawing Using Signal Processing Techniques and its relevance to Entropy study of Human Brain Activity, Proc. of ICSCI’06, Vol-2,530-533 (2006)

[9] Mohd Abubakr, APN Rao, Analysis of Non-Linear Schrödinger equations for Optical fields in Dispersion and Non-linear Regimes: Generation of Optical Solitons, Journal of Engineering Students, Cafet Innova Publications 2007.

[10] R.M. Vinay, Mohd Abubakr, A Heuristic Model for efficient Disjoint Multipath Routing Using Directional antennas in wireless mobile Ad-Hoc Networks, Proc. of  International Conference on Advances in Computing, ACM Chapter, Maharashtra, 2008.

arXiv Submissions:

[1] On Dimensional Analysis, Redundancy in set of fundamental quantities and Proposal of a New Set, arXiv:0710.3483v1 [physics.gen-ph]

[2] Beyond Complex Numbers, arXiv:math/0701921v1 [math.RA].