In Fall 2001, the last four class sessions were devoted to Advanced student presentations of new papers that were not covered in the textbook. The Advanced students were instructed to work either individually or in small groups to read and present papers from those listed in the readings section. Students were expected to read the chosen papers completely, understand them in depth, and present them to the rest of the class. Thus, rather than repeat what the authors say literally, students were expected to try to extract the important ideas from the papers and present them in a clear and economical way. This would mean, for example, reading other related papers, restating the author's definitions and results, filling in missing details, or relating the work to other topics covered over the course of the semester. Here are some examples of these presentations.
Student work is included courtesy of and used with permission of the students listed below:
A Brief Introduction to Paxos, by Dion Harmon and Jason Burns (PDF)
Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance Replication Algorithm, by Jingyi Yu (PDF)
Computing with Infinitely Many Processes Under Assumptions on Concurrency and Participation - M. Merritt and G. Taubenfeld, by Dean Christakos and Deva Seetharam (PDF)
Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-Peer Lookup Service, by Jacob Strauss and Edwin Olson (PDF)
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, by Seth Gilbert (PDF)
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, by Tina Nolte, slides (PDF) and notes (PDF)
Self-Stabilization, by Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi and Vahab Mirrokni (PDF)