Overview

An important part of doing research is to know the work of other researchers. This work is presented in publication venues, such as conference proceedings and journals, relevant to your area of research. It is important to identify and read the top publication venues in your area of research.

A Ph.D. dissertation requires a chapter of literature review. At UCI, this review must be completed before advancing to candidacy.

A typical literature review may contain X appropriate references. You may need to read Y papers to find X that are appropriate for your dissertation. If you read and sumarize one paper per week, it will take you Z months to complete a reasonable literature review.

Reviewing literature is time consuming and requires effort, so it is easy to procrastinate. However, as it is both valuable and required, you must plan ahead to ensure you achieve your education goals.

Ultimately, you must organize and make sense of the literature, but you can start by summarizing/criticizing individual papers.

Information

• Focus on developing research skills such as
  • selecting a general area of research interest
  • identifying, reading, summarizing, and categorizing the relevant research literature
  • building an on-line summary-library we can share
  • comming up with new research ideas as we criticize papers
  • developing individual research interests and focusing your research topic
  • writing and revising publishable papers
  • practicing preparing and giving technical presentation on results from your research activities
  • tracking journals and scheduling for publication deadlines
• This activity is essential for Ph.D. students.

Middleware Research Topics (to be refined as we go)

• ResearchIndex.org
• Real-time Topics
  • Event Scheduling
  • QoS
  • Other specific sub-topics
• Fault Tolerance
• Load Balancing
• Embedded Systems
• Distributed Systems
  • Wide-Area Distributed Systems
• Security
• Middleware Architectures
  • Middleware Design Patterns
  • Reflective Middleware
  • Event-based Middleware
• Middleware Optimizations
• CORBA Architecture
  • ORB Architecture
  • POA Architecture
  • Transport Protocol Architecture
• CORBA Services
  • Naming, Trading
  • Time, Event, Notification
  • Transaction

Homework Algorithm

• Check out the on-line research index at ResearchIndex.org and give a focused search for some topic you are interested in such as "real-time CORBA" then do a document search.
• Look at (no need to read yet) a few of the articles, such as "A High-performance Endsystem Architecture for Real-time CORBA" - Douglas Schmidt (1997) and "The Design and Performance of a Real-time CORBA Event Service" - Timothy Harrison (1997)
• Read the abstract of each article.
• Note the number of citations.
• Look at the titles of a few of the articles these were cited by.
• Now go back to the main page and do a search for someone famous by citations.
• How many on-line articles has he authored?
• Select a general topic from Middleware Research Topics listed above
• Find a list of papers related to your topic, try various keywords
• Narrow down your list to about 5 articles that sound interesting after skimming the titles and abstracts.
• Pick one and summarize it using the summary form below.
• Add your summary to this web site and a link to it in the outline above.
• Update your list of papers related to your topic from bibliography and new search
• Pick one, summarize, present, and add summary to web site like you did in homework 1.

General topic areas:
    Distributed computing
    Real-time programming
    Embedded systems
    Modeling
    Middleware layers (from lowest level to highest)
        OS service layer
        Infrastructure middleware
        Distribution middleware
        General middleware services
        Application specific middleware services
        Application Glue code
    Reflective middleware

Specific topics:
    Real-time CORBA
    Real-time Java (RTSJ)
    Aspects and AspectJ
    Object-oriented design patterns, particularly
        Strategy
        Abstract factory
        Component configurator
        Acceptor/Connector
        Reactor
    The design of TAO, ZEN, ...
    jUnit, jRate, OVM, ...

More advanced topics:
    Load balancing
    Fault Tolerance
    Security
    Scheduling algorithms for Real-time systems
    Group and group communication