Seminar on Master’s Thesis Writing, Class 3
Reporting Verbs
1) Separate the following reporting verbs into three categories:
Suggest, describe, reveal, argue, note, show, speculate, point out, reject, strongly believe that,
propose, deny, negate, report, challenge, take into consideration, study, imply, emphasize,
recommend, demonstrate, postulate, claim, examine, go on to say that, state.
Neutral Tentative Strong
2) Look at the reporting verbs in the sentences and try to replace them with reporting verbs
with similar meaning. You might have to do slight alterations to the sentences.
a) Dr. Green confirms the results as valid and informative.
b) It is suggested that further research be made in this area.
c) The allegations were denied by the instructor.
d) Bořivoj suggested measuring the conductive abilities with a fork.
e) The claims from Chan’s paper were challenged by MU FI professors.
f) The data do not support the original aim of the thesis.
g) This paper proposes that a superconductive electromagnetism is the future of the auto
industry.
h) It must be emphasized that the preliminary results were very promising.
For each excerpt, identify the source of the ambiguity: (1) improper syntax (word order),
(2) missing comma, (3) unclear pronoun reference, or (4) grouping of conflicting words.
1) With the lid off the reactor core was exposed, allowing radioactive isotopes to escape.
2) We propose to provide the above engineering services hourly based on the following estimates.
3) Compared with the pollution of the average coal-fired plant, the thermal pollution of a nuclear
power plant is less than 2 percent more.
4) Reductions up to 80% in heat and mass transfer coefficients were measured due to outgassing.
Seminar on Master’s Thesis Writing, Class 3
5) As airplane designs change the anti-ice systems also have to change.
6) Most people are diagnosed with phenylketonuria at birth.
7) The use of the thermal storage unit is limited to supplying low-pressure auxiliary steam because of
insufficient excess energy from the undersized collector.
8) At this time, the Department of Energy is only considering Yucca Mountain as a possible storage
site for nuclear waste. Other possible sites are excluded from discussion.
9) If the airplane waits too long to take off the de-ice fluid can dissipate.
Fill in the gaps in the introduction to an academic article with the correct term
environments, sensors, perception, been, robots, introduction, world, account, dynamic,
autonomously, emphasis, traditional,
Introduction
The metaphor of a (software) agent is nowadays widely used for programs that act
________________ in software environments, in computer networks, and mostly known in the
internet. Agent Oriented Techniques have ________________ developed for programming such
agents and for modeling complex software problems with the help of the agent paradigm.
Similar to autonomous agents, autonomous ________________ have to act in their
________________ by their own means. But the environment of robots is the real
________________ . This is much more challenging than the virtual reality of computer networks.
________________ software technology is based on the trust, that the system will behave exactly as
specified. This is not longer true if the physical world is inside the loop. The Cyberphysical systems
initiative [8] looks for new developments in software technology which can take related effects into
________________ .
This paper discusses some possibilities to consider a robot control as a control by an agent
with inputs and outputs that are derived from the real world via ________________ and actuators.
We start with a short ________________ to Agent Oriented Techniques. Then we discuss the
possibilities to use related techniques for robots. It turns out, that reactive basic skills for robots
need much more ________________ than related skills of agents. More deliberative tasks like
planning can benefit from techniques developed for agents. Since real environments are highly
________________ , classical planning techniques are not flexible enough, but there exist more
sophisticated techniques for agents which are useful for robotics as well. Good algorithms for
________________ in the real world are a key problem for robot programming with many (still
unsolved) challenges.
Seminar on Master’s Thesis Writing, Class 3
Linking Words Exercise
1) Polls show that Tony Blair is the most popular Prime Minister this century. ______________ ,
there are even members of his own party who are uneasy with his approach.
In particular However For instance
2) There are some slight variations in temperature, but ________________ 26 to 27ºC should be
expected.
Consequently otherwise as a rule
3) The two main Channel Islands, ________________ Jersey and Guernsey, are much closer to France
than to England.
For example namely in particular
4) It was announced that nurses' working hours would be increased by 25%. ______________ , even
fewer trainee nurses are expected to join the profession.
As a result So that Likewise
5) Sales of CDs have experienced a small but steady fall over the past 12 months. _____________ ,
vinyl records have seen an increase in their share of the market, up to 1.7%.
Above all Correspondingly In contrast
6) The Vice Chancellor explained that in light of the current financial climate and because of
unexpected bad debts, it would be necessary to peg salary levels at their current level for all grades
of staff. ______________ , no-one was getting a pay rise.
Nevertheless In other words Similarly
7) It is clear, therefore, that the situation in Brazil will improve only slowly. ______________ the
economic problems being experienced in Japan, the outlook is slightly more optimistic.
Furthermore In comparison With reference to
8) In order to try to reduce car use in the inner cities, the government has announced new
restrictions on company parking spaces and ______________ , a new tax on individual car use.
As well as in addition in the same way
9) Essays must be handed in by the deadline, ______________ they will not be marked.
Obviously otherwise as a result
10) ______________ it has been shown that fractures can occur at even relatively low pressures, the
use of the material should not be completely discounted.
Nevertheless Because Even though
Seminar on Master’s Thesis Writing, Class 3
Read the following abstract and identify its parts.
(1) Personalized Web applications automatically adapted for different clients and user preferences
gain more importance. (2) Still there are barely technologies to compensate the additional effort of
creating, maintaining and publishing such Web content. (3) To address this problem, this paper
introduces a declarative, component-based approach for adaptive, dynamic Web documents on the
basis of XML-technology. (4) Adaptive Web components on different abstraction levels are defined in
order to support effective Web page authorizing and generation. (5) Hierarchical document
components playing a specific semantic role are also defined. (6) The hyperlink view for defining
typed links is spanned over all component layers. (7) Beside the issue of both implementation
artifacts and higher level concepts, the model also allows to define adaptive behavior of components
in a fine-granular way. (8) As a further benefit the support for ubiquitous collaboration via
component annotations is introduced. (9) Finally, the stepwise pipeline-based process of document
generation is introduced and performance issues are sketched.