https://www.inf.unibz.it/~calvanese/teaching/2026-02-PhD-RM/

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Faculty of Engineering
PhD in Computer Science

National PhD in Artificial Intelligence

Home page of the course
Research Methods

41st PhD Cycle - February - March 2026

Course Coordinator: Diego Calvanese

The lectures are taught in presence at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, and are also broadcast online via MS Teams.

Students who intend to participate should fill-in this form, so as to be added to the MS Team of the course.

Course Overview

The course consists of six units, taught in six different weeks by different lecturers from the Faculty of Engineering. Each unit foresees two lectures, one at the beginning of the week and one at the end of the week.

The dates below are tentative and need to be confirmed. So, do not yet make plans counting on these dates.

Unit 1: Introduction to research and scientific paper reading and writing - Diego Calvanese (9/2/2026 - 13/2/2026)
  1. What is Research?
  2. Research in Computer Science
  3. Selection of PhD topic
  4. Reading scientific papers
  5. How to write a scientific paper
Schedule:

Unit 2: Empirical/experimental CS research methods - Niccolò Pretto (16/2/2026 - 20/2/2026)
Schedule:

Unit 3: How to write a research plan - Antonella De Angeli (17/2/2025 - 21/2/2025)
Schedule:

Unit 4: Presenting scientific work - Marco Montali (24/2/2025 - 28/2/2025)
Schedule:

Unit 5: Good scientific writing style - Niccolò Pretto (10/3/2025 - 13/3/2025)
Schedule:

Unit 6: Research evaluation - Werner Nutt (17/3/2025 - 21/3/2025)
  1. Bibliometrics
  2. Peer reviewing
Schedule:

Assignments

Each unit foresees an assignment, which will be communicated to the students during the first lecture of the unit. In the time period between the first and second lecture of the unit, the students should complete their assignment, and (part of) the second lecture will be devoted to discussing the assignment.

The form of the assignment may vary for each unit, and is specific to the topics of the unit.

The time estimated to complete each assignment is 19 hours, which, when added to the 6 hours required to attend the two lectures of the unit, results in 25 hours of work. These correspond to 1 ECTS credit. Hence, upon completion of all assignments, a student can be granted 6 ECTS credits.

Course Material

The slides used for each unit will be made available by the lecturer of the unit in the MS Teams channel for the course.

Writing for Computer Science (3rd Edition). Justin Zobel. Springer. 2015.
ISBN: 978-1-4471-6638-2 (Print), 978-1-4471-6639-9 (Online).
Electronic edition available via the unibz library through SpringerLink.

Additional useful material

On Writing

On Reading

On Scholarly Publishing

On Doing Research

Back to home page of Diego Calvanese
Last modified: Saturday, 15-Nov-2025 2:39:50 CET