{}@ee.washington.edu

Dept of EE, University of Washington

Seattle WA, 98195-2500

UWEE Technical Report Number Department of Electrical Engineering University of Washington Box 352500 Seattle, Washington 98195-2500 PHN: (206) 543-2150 FAX: (206) 543-3842 URL: http://www.ee.washington.edu

The University of Washington, Department of EE Technical Report

Series

{}@ee.washington.edu

Dept of EE, University of Washington at Seattle

Seattle WA, 98195-2500

University of Washington, Dept. of EE,

Abstract

1 Introduction

The University of Washington department of EE technical report (TR) series gives us a unified departmental way for us to both internally and externally document research that is occurring in our department. There are a variety of reasons for establishing this series including:

It will increase department visibility

It encourages and provides a procedure for preliminary publishing of Journal articles which often can take a year or more to become externally available.

Technical reports can be much more detailed than journal articles since there are no length restrictions.

It creates an easy forum where short-term (i.e., 3-6 month) visiting scholars can publish the results of their research.

It provides a way for students to start publishing journal-length articles prior to the actual journal submission process themselves. TRs can be turned into official journal articles thereafter.

It allows for the publishing of experimental results that are perhaps not suited for journals or that are conventionally not published. This includes extra experimental details, initial less significant results, extra detail which is normally not significant to most readers but is for a few readers, and so on. The TR series provides a vehicle where this sort of information can still be formally documented in some way.

It allows for extended conference papers (e.g., longer than 4-8 pages) to be published, ones that may or may not ultimately wind up as a journal article.

It does not require any administrative resources since all submission and editing is done automatically via the WWW, and all editorial decisions are done by the submitting faculty member.

It is important to note that this series only supplements and not replace official journal publication. It is intended that better TRs will ultimately wind up as official archival journal articles. Note also that it is not indented for the UWEE TR series to replace the fact that authors put their own publications on their own web pages. Typically those papers have already been published. The UWEE series offers another vehicle to formally publish papers (that can be any length) before officially publishing them either in a journal or a peer reviewed conference. Such will strengthen the department overall.

The TR services are available only online, where the documents are available for free via the web. Both postscript and ADOBE PDF format are supported, one may submit new TRs either in postscript or PDF (whichever is more convenient). Once the TR is ready, one may click to see either a postscript or PDF version (the format of submission is automatically converted to the other format). Hard-copy requests of the TR documents are not accommodated at this time.

The TR submission procedure is entirely online. Only faculty have the ability to obtain and assign TR numbers. Once a TR is approved by faculty and an official TR number is allocated, the TR can be submitted by anyone who has been granted access in the automatic access list.

The administration of the TR series is minimal. Only when there are problems or bugs will we need to physically involve the webmaster.

Each TR has a uniformly-styled cover page which indicates the title, authors, and author organizations (some authors might jointly submit a TR with their colleagues off-site), and the official unified departmental TR number. The TR number is of the form UWEETR-yyyy-nnnn, where yyyy indicates the year, and nnnn indicates the TR number within that year. Template documents for TRs that have appropriately formatted cover pages (of course without a current TR number) are available on the web page both in Latex and MSWord format. These templates make it easy to set up the TR formatting and rapidly submit a document that you have previously prepared.

Submissions may only be performed by faculty members. The submitting faculty constitutes an "editorial board", so at least one faculty member needs to approve each submission. This is implemented by password protection on the web page. This feature speeds up publishing time while maintaining quality and since it is administered automatically via the web and a password.

The web page access provides author, abstract, key-word, and title search capabilities so recurring topics within departmental sub-groups can add their own keywords. This will make it possible to quickly generate lists that are most pertinent to them. Our TR series is also set up in such a way so that the big search engines (google.com, altavista.com, etc.) will automatically index our TR pages (including titles, authors, keywords, and the abstracts). So if one does a google search with particular query topic, it will appear as one of the TRs.

2 What should be submitted as a TR?

There many varieties of written documents that we encourage you to submit as UWEE TRs. These include:

Large drafts of journal papers that will ultimately be submitted as official archival journal articles.

Extended drafts of journal or conference articles containing a great deal more detail, additional results, explanations and so on.

Articles that contain ideas or preliminary results that you want to have documented in an official form.

Results that you want to release early, that you want to be available before the typically long journal review process.

Good quality masters and Ph.D. theses.

Good quality student papers. This includes top quality student projects from classes.

Documentation about your projects or labs that you wouldn't make available otherwise.

Documentation about either hardware or software systems that were designed and built here at UWEE.

That long lost paper that you almost finished but never submitted either to a conference or journal.

Long articles that perhaps are not of Journal quality, but that are still good and should be published in some form. This might include, for example, extended experimental evidence for a phenomena that is well known, but that might be useful to have available nonetheless.

Course-related materials that are typically distributed to students. This includes reading books (traditionally available via copy centers) and other course materials.

3 The online submission process.

Submitting a new TR is relatively easy, and it is done entirely through the web. Note again that only faculty members have the ability to submit a new TR and thereby create a new TR number.

The web pages for submitting TRs are for the most part self documenting. Therefore, this description here will provide the general idea of the submission process. A TR might be in one of two states, either private or public. A private paper is not yet available on the TR index (so no other users may see it). A private TR may also not yet have an associated PDF or postscript document. This is so that a TR number can be created and then incorporated into the cover page of the TR (using the latex or MSWORD templates). Only after the final electronic form of the paper is ready and submitted can the TR be made public.

Here is an "algorithm" for submitting a new TR:

Write a paper in either latex or MS Word. You might at this point want to obtain the latex or MS Word templates from the TR web pages. If you already have a pre-existing document, it is of course easy to adopt them to the UWEETR format by substituting the template (in latex this is done via a style file).

From the TR series web page, click to submit a paper to the series. You will be prompted for your username and password.

Fill out all the appropriate fields given on the web page. This includes your

full name

email address

a list of users who may make changes to the list (here is where you give your students the ability to go in and change certain particular TRs). The users are specified by giving their main EE-systems login name (e.g., 'bilmes' for Jeff Bilmes, 'chizeck' for Howard Chizeck, or 'trav' for Travis Saling).

A special access password. Each TR might have a special password so that certain users who know the TR number and password, and who are outside UWEE, are allowed to make changes to the TR.

The title of the paper, as it will be indexed and searched on the web page.

The authors of the paper, as it will be indexed and searched on the web page.

list of keywords (also for search purposes)

The abstract, again as it will appear and be indexed.

Click on "submit this paper". You now have created a new private TR that does not yet have an associated TR number. That number will appear on the screen (and you will get an email confirmation with the number).

Incorporate the number into your TR. Review the TR on your compute to ensure that the TR number is correct.

Go back to the TR page, this time by "editing an existing paper". This will list all previously created TRs that you have the ability to edit. Choose the one corresponding to the TR number you have just created.

Scroll to the bottom and use the browse option to select either the postscript or PDF version of the TR that you with to submit.

At this time, you have the option to make the TR public. You can leave the TR private if you so choose to. THE TR IS NOT AVAILABLE TO ANYONE OUTSIDE THE ACCESS GROUP UNTIL YOU MAKE IT PUBLIC. Therefore, make sure you make your TR public when you are ready.

If you have selected to make your paper public, it will now be available from the main TR web page. If you want to at a later time submit an updated version of the TR, you may still do so by editing an existing paper.