EN.601.716 Advanced Topics in Internet of Things
Graduate course, Johns Hopkins University, Computer Science Department, 2025
Still under construction
Course time: TuTh 1:30-2:45 p.m.
Location: Krieger 309
Instructor: Renjie Zhao
Office: Malone Hall 231
Office hours: Thursday 3:00-4:00 p.m., and by appointment
CA: Ruirong Huang, rhuang36 AT jh dot edu
Claim: this course is designed based on UCSD CSE 291 by Prof. Pat Pannuto.
Quick Links: Paper Reviews | Participation | Class Project | Schedule | Final Exam / Presentations
Overview
IoT represents a paradigm shift in computing, aiming to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds. Its development has opened up new possibilities, including mobile health, smart homes, industrial automation, and more. Throughout the course, students will delve into advanced topics such as IoT networking, mobile and edge computing, embedded machine learning, wireless sensing, human-computer interaction, and mobile health applications. To excel in this course, students are expected to engage in pre-class readings, active in-class participation, and complete a semester-long project. The focus of the course will be on training research philosophy and principle instead of paper’s technical detail.
Syllabus
This class is made of three components: pre-class reviews, in-class participation, and a quarter-long project.
Paper reviews
Before each class you must read two papers and then write a short review.
1 Review Submission
We will use the HotCRP review system – the same tool used by many conferences to review papers. We will create accounts for all enrolled students during the first week of classes. If you need an account or have other issues, please e-mail me.
The review form is following the conferences in the field of computer networks and mobile computing. (Except the Reviewer expertise is replaced by Writing quality)
2 Guides
The review should be more than a simple summary of the paper. Here are some questions to consider while reading and writing your reviews to help guide you:
What is the problem this paper addresses, and why is it important?
What is the main contribution of the paper? New research direction? Novel techniques? Solid system design?
What is the hypothesis of this paper?
How was the paper evaluated? What supported it, what refuted it?
What are the limits of this system (when does it fail)?
What is this most similar to that you are already familiar with; how does it compare, differ?
At what point did you decide you liked – or didn’t like – the paper, why?
Since the papers covers a lot of different fields, you are not required to dig into every corner and totally understand every technical details. (No one is able to be an expert of all fields). You can go though the paper and focused on thinking the guiding questions.
3 Grading (40%)
No need to concern about the grading as long as you contribute enough efforts to the course. Every completed enough review counts 2 points. The lead is responsible to review the reviews and mark any missed or need improvement ones. Please use this sheet (TBD).
Participation
We will rotate through class members to lead discussion each session. Leads should be prepared to give an overview of the paper’s key ideas and to guide a discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of the paper, how it relates to prior and/or subsequent work, and what the core takeaway(s) of the paper may be.
When not the lead, everyone else is expected to have read the papers and to actively participate in the class discussions.
The last 15 mins will be used for elevator pitch of the group projects.
1 Discussion Lead
Each paper has roughly 30 minutes of class time. For discussions, this should generally allow for a 5 minute introduction followed by 25 minutes of discussion.
When you are leading discussion, you have three primary responsibilities like a typical paper review lead:
Prepare a summary presentation of the paper. This summary should be reasonably polished / prepared in advance. The summary should recount the major concepts introduced in the paper, give an overview of the core technical details, and crisply identify any hypotheses presented in the work, how they were evaluated, and any conclusions that can be drawn.
Prepare and share a summary others’ paper reviews. Try to first identify any points of confusion or desired clarifications, so that we can start the discussion by getting everyone up to speed. Then propose (at least) three topics of discussion from the paper. Try to include (at least) one that looks at the paper’s strengths, one that looks at potential weaknesses, and one that looks beyond the ideas directly discussed in the paper. Share this summary and discussion prompts in the class slack before the start of class.
Lead discussion! Start with your summary presentation, then any remaining clarifications, and then the more open-ended discussion segment. (Raise some questions for discussion.)
When you are discussion lead, you do not need to submit reviews.
2 Grading (20%)
10% for discussion lead and presentation.
10% for course participation. Checked by name tag. Ask for leave through email if you have reasonable excuse.
3 Project Elevator Pitch
In order to provide timely feedbacks on the projects during the whole semester, elevator pitch is introduced for project updates. The elevator pitch presentations are not needed to be well constructed. You can just briefly discuss what you have done recently.
There will be two pitches per course and every talk will take 5 mins. Stop watch will be used to notify the presenter. The arrangement will be flexible according to the time left after two main discussions.
Class Project
This class will feature a quarter long project of your own choosing.
There are different kinds of choices:
Research project: Project scope should be commensurate with group size – an individual project is acceptable, though advised against. A core goal of the project is to demonstrate mastery of the scientific method: namely to clearly articulate a hypothesis and to design and implement experiments that (in)validate the hypothesis (note: a project with a negative result may still be a highly successful project!). The goal of the project is to learn how to propose a research idea, to then collect preliminary data to probe the viability of that idea, and finally to practice communicating this process in writing.
Reproduce and explore. If you do not have a specific project in mind, a good starting point might be picking some impactful papers (Best papers, most cited papers or test of time awarded papers). Reproduce the classic or already succeed projects and explore new directions. I will support some projects which aligns my interest.
You can reuse your own research project for the class project (as long as you can convince me it is related to the course topic). Please do notify us if you do so and the guidance and expectation will be adjusted accordingly.