A Suggestive Template of Survey (Term) Paper
Title: This is the specific topic you studied
Your name and roll number
Introduction
Here, you must describe the context in which the problem you studied
arises. You must define the problem and describe why you think it is
important to solve this problem. You must provide a brief overview of
the techniques you learnt during the course of your study, and outline
the remainder of the paper.
Problem Formulation and Notation
This should be a short section giving the precise problem formulation,
and introducing all notation you will be using in the remainder of the
paper.
Solution Techniques/Issues
For each solution technique that you have studied, you must briefly
summarize the technique. We do not expect you to replicate the gory
details of any specific technique. Instead, we expect you to state
in your own words the key idea/intuition/observation that leads to
each solution technique. Key results may be stated as theorems.
Proofs need not be given, although a line or two describing the idea
of the proof (e.g. by structural induction, using a reduction to
the graph colouring problem, etc) is essential.
When describing algorithms, you must show the working of the algorithm
using a small example. Simply stating the pseudocode without
explaining with a small example will not fetch adequate credit.
Examples should be your own creations, and not plagiarised from the
papers you have been reading.
Comparison of solution techniques
We expect you to provide a comprehensive comparison and contrast
of the techniques you described in the previous sections. Such
comparisons may include data from the papers.
Your own perspective on the problem
This is a very important section where we expect you to provide your own
perspective on the problem and give your suggestions on how existing
techniques can be bettered. You must provide detailed explanations
of why you think your suggestions would improve existing solution
techniques. If you feel that a problem is much harder than it has
been assumed to be by earlier researchers, you must provide a
proof/informal justification for the same.
Conclusion
In this section, we expect you to summarize the different techniques/solution
techniques you studied, to identify open areas in this problem domain, and
to suggest directions for future research. Like the previous section,
this is a very important section of your term paper.
References
A complete list of references (papers you studied or referenced) must be
included. Your term paper is incomplete without this.