Seminar on Scientific Soft Skills (NPGR024)
summer 2011/2012

This seminar is for students who want to improve their scientific soft-skills in the English language. The attendees will:

The seminar will be held completely in English, i.e. all the papers, discussions, talks and reports are in English.
Regular participation in the seminar is required. Students are allowed to miss the seminar without a proper excuse at most twice.
During the semester, talks on different aspects of the "soft" scientific work (reading, writing, presenting) will be given by the lecturer.
Classes start by a 15-20 minute exercise from Hewings: Advanced grammar in use.
In the 3rd week, students will give a 5 minute presentation summarizing their current research work targeted at a wide audience with no knowledge of the respective research field.
At the beginning of the semestr, each student chooses one research paper to work with. During the semester, the student will
- prepare a conference style presentation of the paper with slides (15 + 5 minutes sharp)
- write a critical review of the paper (review form)
- lead a critical discussion of the paper in the class
- write a two-page summary of the paper in a format suitable for a conference submission (formatting instructions | LaTeX template)

Student	Paper
1. Jan Beneš	Galin et al., Authoring Hierarchical Road Networks, Pacific Graphics 2011
2. Ján Dupej	Combes et al., Automatic symmetry plane estimation of bilateral objects in point clouds, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2008.
3. Ondřej Karlík	Lafortune & Willems, A 5D Tree to Reduce the Variance of Monte Carlo Ray Tracing, EGWR 1995.
4. Agata Kleczek	Delong & Gerrard, Mean-Variance Portfolio Selection for a Non-life. Insurance Company, Mathematics and Economics, 2008.
5. Martin Šik	Bowers et al., Parallel Poisson disk sampling with spectrum analysis on surfaces, SIGGRAPH Asia 2010.
6. Zdeněk Trávníček	Lang et al., Nonlinear Disparity Mapping for Stereoscopic 3D, SIGGRAPH 2010
7. Peter Tylka	Bober, MPEG-7 visual shape descriptors, IEEE TCSVT.
8. Jiří Vorba	Peter & Pietrek, Importance Driven Construction of Photon Maps, EGWR 1998.
9. Aleš Zita	Mehdi et al. Blind Source Camera Model Identification, International Conference on Image Processing, 2004.
10. Louis Hache	Rosin & Lai, Towards Artistic Minimal Rendering, NPAR 2010.

Date	Program	Slides	Attendance
02/23/2012	Introduction. English self-evaluation test. Paper assignment.	pdf \| pptx
03/01/2012	English grammar. Paper assignment. Lecture 1.	pdf \| pptx	1
03/08/2012	Student presentations. English grammar. Lecture 2.	2 \| 4 \| 5 \| 6 \| 7 \| 8 \| 9	3
03/15/2012	Paper presentation: Jan Beneš	1 \| 3 \| 1 - Rd Networds	4
03/22/2012	Student presentation: Agata Kleczeck \| Paper presentation: Peter Tylka	4 \| 7 - MPEG-7
03/29/2012	Student presentation: Louis Hache \| Paper presentation: Agata Kleczek	10 \| 4 - Non-life insurance
04/05/2012	Paper presentation: Ondřej Karlík Paper review due.		AK, PT
04/12/2012	Paper presentation: Zdeněk Trávníček Paper review discussion.
04/19/2012	Paper presentation: Aleš Zita
04/26/2012	Paper presentation: Martin Šik, Louis Hache
05/03/2012	Paper presentation: Ján Dupej, Jiří Vorba
05/10/2012	Presentation revision: Agata Kleczeck Written summary due.
05/17/2012	--- (no seminar)
05/24/2012	"Intl. Soft Skills Conference" (= 2nd round of paper presentations): Session 1 & 2