A minimum of 75% attendance is required.
Research Methodology course (Carlo Ghezzi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
1. What is research? Why do we do research? Variety of research areas. The social effects of research. Research methodology: The scientific method. Induction and deduction in research. Different kinds of research (forma, empirical, constructive). The notion of scientific truth. Precision and recall. Different approaches to validation of research outcomes.
2. Research methodology: Different kinds of research (formal, empirical, constructive). The notion of scientific truth. Precision and recall. Different approaches to validation of research outcomes
3. Publication of research outcomes (including artifacts). Peer review. Towards open science.
4. Evaluation in research. Evaluation of researchers in their career progress. Qualitative and qualitative research. Bibliometrics: motivations and pitfalls.
5. Research ethics. Ethical issues in performing research, reporting results, reviewing, relating to peers. Research topic specific ethical issues, dealing with humans, animals, and environment.
Teaching methods
Ex-cathedra lessons and seminars. Students are invited to read the material that will be presented in class (see below under bibliography), to make the class as interactive as possible. Two sessions are devoted to an in-depth dicsussion of students’ exercises (see below under assessment).
Assessment methods
Students do two collective exercises, which require individual and group work. The results are discussed in class in a plenary meeting.
One exercise is in paper reviewing, the other focuses on a set of ethical case studies.
Bibliography
C. Ghezzi, “Being a Researcher –An Informatics Perspective”, Springer, 2020 (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-45157-8)
Seminar: The (legal) management of scientific research data: a mission impossibile? by Paolo Guarda, University of Trento
Scientific research is based on data, which represent the starting point for the postulate of theorems, for the proof of a thesis, for the proposal of reliable solutions. Over time, the world of law has prepared regulatory systems that have, in a fragmented and sectorial way, provided regulation to the various contexts concerned, rarely seeking, if not exceptionally and sometimes unconsciously, an overall vision. This seminar aims to briefly explore the specificities of the legal regime of scientific research data, offering an analysis based on a systematic method which not only intends to provide a guide to the various legal issues, but which makes interdisciplinarity the real added value and the necessary key to understanding the phenomena in progress.
Seminar: Publishing in Computer Science: how it works and what you need to know by Aliaksandr Birukou, Springer Nature, Germany
In this lecture, we first cover the basic elements of the publication landscape (proceedings, journals, and books) and the role of publishers. We will look not only into commercial or society publishers, but also emerging self-publishing venues. Then we discuss the publication ethics, i.e., plagiarism, duplicate submissions or publications, retractions. We continue by discussing predatory publishers and how to not become their victim. The second part of the lecture will deal with various models of peer review and new tools and practices, including but not limited to open access, open data, CrossMark, ORCID, Publons, conference rankings.
