16.3: Survey and Tutorial

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The goal of a survey is to provide an overview over a body of work — potentially from different communities — and classify it into different categories. Doing this synthesis and establishing common language and formalism is the survey’s main contribution. A survey following such an outline is a possible deliverable for an independent study or a PhD prelim, but it does not lend itself to describe your efforts on a focused research project. Rather, it might result from your involvement in a relatively new area in which you feel important connections between disjoint communities and common language have not been established.

A different category of survey critically examines concurring methods to solve a particular problem. For example, you might have set out to study manipulation, but got stuck in selecting the right sensor suite from the many available options. What sensor is actually best to accomplish a specific task? A survey which answers this question experimentally will follow the same structure as a research paper (see above).

A tutorial is closely related to a survey, but focuses more on explaining specific technical content, e.g, the workings of a specific class of algorithms or tool, commonly used in a community. A tutorial might be an appropriate way to describe your efforts in a research project, which can serve as illustration to explain the workings of a specific method you used.