Study of a research article (graded work)

Latest update: December 2, 2025

List of assigned articles

Important rules for this assignment

Please make sure to read and understand the following rules for this graded assignment. If you have any question, please do not hesitate to contact the teachers as soon as possible (and typically before starting your work).

• The submitted materials (for example: reports, slides, oral presentations, answers to questions raised by the teaching staff, …) must come from your own work (i.e., only the work performed by you and the other members of your group).

• Using external material (for example, other research articles, presentation slides, technical documentations, lectures from other teachers, blog posts, source code, video/audio presentations, …) to better understand the topic and/or to illustrate some aspects is accepted. However, the usage of all of such external sources must be precisely acknowledged. And, in particular, the source of every external piece of text, information or figure must be explicitly mentioned and clearly associated with the corresponding elements. In other words:

  • Mention all the external sources that you have used (if any). And provide all the required details to access the source (typically, a web link if possible).
  • For every source, mentioned exactly what you used it for. (You can provided this information in a dedicated section/appendix of your document/presentation, to avoid overloading the main part).
  • If you reuse a Figure or a piece of code (or pseudo-code) from an external source, mention it explicitly. Similarly, if you reuse a piece of texte, put it into quotes and mention the source.

• Using AI (artificial intelligence) assistants (for example, generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) to prepare this assignment is forbidden. This includes performing requests to clarify/summarize the contents of the papers or to find answers about questions asked by the teachers. If you have a doubt about what is allowed/tolerated or not, please always check with the teachers first.

• In case of doubts regarding a potential violation of the above rules, the teaching staff may contact you (and the other members of your group) and/or summon you to a meeting, in order to clarify the situation.

• Asking questions to the teaching staff (for example, to clarify a specific point in the research article or to check if omitting some details is acceptable) is (of course) allowed. Please make sure to contact the teachers reasonably ahead of time before the deadline to make sure that they have enough time to answer you.

Common guidelines (for all students)

Each group must study and present a distinct research article. The list of assigned papers for all the groups is available in the beginning of this page.

The guidelines below are applicable to oral presentations as well as written presentations (reports). Unless explicitly mentioned, below, we will use the word “presentation” in a general way, encompassing both oral and written presentations.

Overall, the presentation must cover all the following aspects:

Main aspects:

• Publication context: Briefly introduce who are the authors (for example, academic researchers working in University X and/or industrial researchers working in company Y), where and when the paper was published (for example, international conference Z in January 2018).

• Title and topic: Briefly discuss the title of the article, as well as its main topic and keywords. For example: “This article is entitled […]. This work focuses on performance in the context of storage virtualization. More precisely, the authors introduce a new hardware mechanism aimed at improving the performance (disk) I/O-intensive applications, such as databases or data analytics, deployed in virtual machines.”

• Detailed summary of the paper:

  • Note: The is the most important part of the study/assignment so allocate your efforts/time/space accordingly when preparing your presentation.

  • Precisely explain and motivate the problem statement: What is the main research problem/question that the authors are trying to address? Start with the general type of problem (for example: performance, security, safety/bugs, …) and then get into more details about the specific topic(s) of the articles. Try to provide examples/scenarios to clearly illustrate the main aspects. Also try to (briefly) explain why the studied problem is important.

  • Assumptions: Very often, the authors make specific assumptions regarding the problem(s) that they consider and/or the design/implementation/methodology of their proposed solution/study. If this is indeed the case, it is important to explicitly mention/summarize the main assumptions (and if necessary to explain them).

  • Precisely describe the main ideas of the contribution:

    • If the studied article introduces a new technique to solve a problem, then you should discuss the main principles/ideas on which the proposed solution relies.

    • If the study article is a survey (i.e., a conceptual analysis of one or several existing systems/approaches) and/or an experimental study (for example, an experimental characterization of one or several existing systems), then you should discuss the main observations and conclusions made by the authors.

  • Evaluation: In the field of (hardware and software) systems, most research articles provide an experimental evaluation. You should summarize the main experiments and the corresponding results and conclusions.

Additional aspects:

• Note: These aspects are also mandatory in your presentation but can be covered more briefly.

• Pros: a brief description/list of the strengths of the paper.

• Cons: a brief description/list of the weaknesses of the paper.

• Discussion: This is essentially a detailed version of some (or possibly all) of the previous points (pros & cons). Try to make your claims as precise as possible. Point out and discuss things that you find questionable, incorrect, unclear or missing, but also things that make the article interesting and valuable. For example (you are not obliged to cover all the items in that list):

  • Is the motivation clear and convincing?
  • Are the assumptions realistic/limiting?
  • Are the design choices sound?
  • Is the experimental methodology rigorous?
  • How good/deep is the evaluation?

Important advice:

• In your presentation, you will not have enough time/space to discuss all the ideas and results presented in the original paper. So you will have to make deliberate trade-offs between depth and breadth and choose to focus on a relevant subset of the article. This is actually one of the important goals of this assignment.

• Avoid copying or even paraphrasing whole sentences/paragraphs from the paper (or from the slides of the authors). You are expected to structure and express the contents of the your presentation in your own way.

• Keep in mind that using figures (and sometimes also tables) can often be very useful to convey/illustrate a complex idea in a limited amount of time/space.

• Reusing images/tables (via copy-paste) from existing documents is acceptable if you clearly indicate their source. Similarly, reusing a few sentences/paragraphs of text is acceptable if you clearly put them into quotes and indicate their source. In other words, for this assignment, it is not necessary to redraw a figure that is similar to an existing one. Of course, you are also allowed (end even encouraged) to provide your own text, figures and tables.

Specific guidelines for SEOC students

• Each SEOC group must prepare an oral presentation (using slides).

• The first slide of the presentation must indicate the number of your group as well as the name of all the members/authors.

• The last slides (not shown/discussed during the oral presentation), must provide the list of references and materials/documents used to prepare the presentation.

• Given that each group is working on a different research article, each group is invited (and even expected) to attend the presentation of the other groups.

• Each presentation will be followed by questions, asked mainly by the teaching staff but also possibly by the students from the other groups.

• Students will be graded mainly on quality/clarity of their presentation and on their understanding of their assigned research article. Students may also obtain a small bonus for their participation in the discussions/questions about the other articles (presented by other groups).

• The oral presentation of each group must last between 18 and 20 minutes. The time limit will be strictly enforced: the teaching staff will interrupt your group if you exceed your time slot.

• We strongly advise you to rehearse your oral presentation, to make sure that it is smooth (including the transitions/connections between the different parts and speakers) and that it fits within the 20-minute time slot.

• Each student of the group is expected to be involved during the presentation and the questions & answers session. However, given that the size of each group is quite large, we do not necessarily expect each student to talk for the same amount of time (or the same number of slides).

• The presentation slides that will be used for the oral presentation must be sent by email to Renaud Lachaize (first.last @univ-grenoble-alpes.fr) before Wednesday January 7, 2026 at 20:00.

  • The slides must be in PDF format. Other formats will be rejected.
  • Please indicate [M2 virtualization] slides and your group number (for example SEOC-A) in the title of the message.

• The presentation will take place on Thursday January 8, 2026 in the morning (3 hours). Please check ADE for the room and the precise time slot. All the SEOC students must attend the full session.

Specific guidelines for Mosig students

• Each group must prepare and submit a written report.

• The report must be submitted in PDF format. Other formats will be rejected.

• The report format (font size, margins, etc.) must be based the USENIX document template available (for LaTeX and Word/LibreOffice) on the following web page: USENIX templates.

• On the top of the first page of the report, you must indicate the number of your group, as well as the name of all the members/authors.

• The expected length of the report is between 4 and 5 pages. The page count includes everything (text, figure, tables) except the references (and if necessary the details about the usage of these references such as borrowed text/figures).

• The report must be sent to Renaud Lachaize (first.last @univ-grenoble-alpes.fr) before before Wednesday January 7, 2026 at 20:00.

  • Please indicate [M2 virtualization] report and your group number (for example Mosig-1) in the title of the message.