Note: re-visit this page from time to time as experience from teaching in the Computer Science department is added.

Students seem to be satisfied with our Zoom approach (feedback, paraphrased for legal reasons):

The teachers in the department of Computer Science handled the shift
to remote teaching very well. Every teacher did her/his best and the
Zoom lectures are going well. Teachers have a positive attitude concerning
the new teaching style which is very encouraging that we will be able to tackle the coming weeks.

I attended different classes: both Teams and Zoom were tried and Zoom is
better. In some classes it is even better than showing up.


Note concerning Microsoft Teams

It is irresponsible that university teachers are told (by people who never delivered remote lectures for university courses in practise) to use Microsoft Teams for remote lecturing: Teams was never intended for remote lecturing (Microsoft Word is called Word, because it is a word processor -- does Microsoft Teams sound like a synonym for remote teaching?) and is therefore simply the wrong tool (and in addition awkward to use: you need a 3 h course to learn it) -- rather use Zoom! Teams is as well also the wrong tool for ad-hoc meetings with people who are not part of your team! There are better tools for small, but easy to use ad-hoc video meetings.

Whatever tool you choose, remember to make it accessible to everyone. If it does not use standards such as HTML (=runs in browser on whatever system which typically even makes it usable by visually impared), take care that your tool can be used via Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and also mobile platforms, i.e. Android and iOS. (The advantage of the mobile platform is that audio always works there, whereas Linux, Mac OS X, or Microsoft Windows sometimes cause trouble with audio devices, e.g. students do not have a microphone for their desktop computer to ask questions, but their mobile phone has for sure a microphone.)

Our premier tool for giving whole interactive remote lectures is via Zoom. Request a full license from our UTS IT department to get rid of the 40 minute limit of the free version (and e.g. be able to record to automatically upload to Panopto).

• Highly recommended reading: detailed slides on using Zoom for lecturing (check for updated from time to time) by my colleague Matthias Book.
• The setup is as follows: you do screen sharing to share your computer screen that shows, e.g. slides, and you use your webcam to record you, e.g. in front of a whiteboard (use a good, thick black pen). If you have a separate webcam you can also let it point to a sheet of paper on which you write. Instead of a separate webcam, there is also software to connect your mobile phone to your computer and is it as webcam.
  If you record to the Zoom cloud (non-free license only), you get these as two separate videos that you can then combine via Panopto (Create, then Build a session).
• If you record only one stream (e.g. recording not the cloud but via the Zoom client itself), then take care to disable screen sharing while you want to show something with the camera, e.g. the whiteboard. (Otherwise, the single created video will contain only the screensharing.)
• An example, where only one stream is recorded can be found here. Note that this has been recorded as a single stream only -- while watching life via Zoom, studentw can choose whether to see the webcam or the screenshare in full form. But in the recording, when recording localy, the webcam view will only be a small thumbnail in the recorded video while screen sharing is active. So deactive screensharing for those parts where you want to have the webcam view recorded in full size.
• Matthias is currently working on a tutorial video (check this page later again).
• Some practises of using Zoom for lecturing (time will tell whether these are best practises)

While Zoom is great for many attendants, you need to download, install, and start a client (Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows) or app (Android, iOS). While you can enable to run in the browser (e.g. set a checkmark when scheduling), it crashed in my browser after a view minutes.

For smaller meetings, e.g. meet ad-hoc with a single student, consultation times, or a teaching assistant meeting with only a handful of student, you may want to avoid the hassle of Zoom to create/schedule a videoconference session and downloading a client or app.

In this case, you can use video conferencing tools that simply run in a browser and do not need any pre-scheduling of videoconference sessions. There are mainly two alternatives that each have there strengths and weaknesses: Whereby and Jitsi Meet.

Please recommend these tools also to students in order to still talk to each other daily in learning groups or just to have fun.

Jitsi Meet for easiest and somewhat bigger meetings that run in Chrome browser or special mobile apps

• Pro: no account needed, no artifical limit to 4 users, open-source (=possible to install your own server), has some extra features (recording, blurring background, etc.)
• Con: other browsers than Chrome not well supported (they work, but sometimes video freezes), mobile browsers not supported at all, but apps are available, open-source (=if you use the free server provided by the open-source project, it may not handle a lot of load and might be limited to 1.5 h sessions)

Jitsi Meet meet runs in the desktop browser (apps on mobile platforms) and you need no account, i.e. you can immediately start by just agreeing on a URL and typing it in!

To give it a try, the base URL is https://meet.jit.si/
just agree on a room name, append the room name to the base URL and enter it into your browser, e.g https://meet.jit.si/MySuperDuperMeetingRoom

There is no easier way to do a videoconference then with Jitsi Meet! (At least if all use Chrome as browser/have the mobile app installed.)

ensemble.scaleway.com French Jitsi meet installation

Should the above Jitsi meet server be overloaded (and you are OK with a French as default for the changeable language user interface), you can use https://ensemble.scaleway.com/.

There, click on Lancer une réunion to get a random server and room name. If you like, you can change that room name and even use always the same randomly assigned server name to end up with a fixed URL, e.g.: https://v-4110.ensemble.scaleway.com/MySuperDuperMeetingRoom

Once running, you can switch the language: click on the three vertical dots (bottom right corner), then on the gear wheel for the settings, then on the Plus tab, at Langue, choose Anglais.

Whereby for easy small meetings that run in any browser

• Pro: works with almost all browsers, possible to lock a room and require students to knock to make you let them enter the room or put them on hold if you are still busy with other students (e.g. consultation time queue)

no account needed, no artifical limit to 4 users, open-source (=possible to install your own server)

• Con: account needed for host, free version artificially limited to 4 users.

If you do not have more than 4 participants (including you), whereby.com runs completely in the browser (all common desktop browsers, on mobile platforms the standard browsers)

The one who hosts the conference room needs an account, everyone who joins using the URL does not need an account.

Panopto / Recording for Panopto with a (Linux) screen recorder

• HÍ has info on Panopto
• While Panopto allows a live webcast, it has a delay which prevents interaction with students. So we do not use this feature, but use Zoom for live interaction and record that with Zoom and upload the Zoom video to Panopto.
• Linux users can use a screen recorder and upload the created file to Panopto (Note: Panopto even does optical character recognition of every pixel that is recorded, so you video becomes searchable). If you anyway use Zoom (the client works nicely on Linux), you can also let Zoom record to a file and upload that to Panopto.
• Research has shown that screen recordings where you still see a video of the presenter are viewed more than without presenter. One way to achieve this is to record via Zoom which then embeds the presenter video into the recorded shared screen (or enable in settings on the Zoom web page "Record active speaker, gallery view and shared screen separately" to get separate files). Another would be to use https://studio.opencast.org/ that is a purely web-based recording software and allows to record camera and screen into separate videos that you can then upload to Panopto by creating a single session that combined the two videos.
• If you recorded already in the past and want to re-use recordings now:
  • be aware that Panapto orders by default by recording date. But you can re-order them and asks students not to order by recording date, but by "order". (Unfortunately, UGLA shows videos always ordered by recordings date -- so make students aware of that.)
  • Note that Panopto sometimes forgets the encoding of old videos (black screen, only audio), but by re-processing it you can get it back: see this video for problem and solution description (audio is distorted: audio recording level was set too high).

Some Best Practises

We have a daily short videoconference to exchange experience in remote teaching (these videoconferences are via Zoom, so at the same time it is a practise in using Zoom; furthermore, instead of being home alone with family, it is good to see colleagues) and after one week of remote teaching we had a separate videoconference with students to get feedback from them and to let them know that our department is with them.

Update: now that everyone has Canvas, you can easily sync Canvas and Gradescope with respect to student roster and assignments:
when creating an assignment in Canvas, select as assignment type/tegund skill the type external/ytra and then type in "Gradescope" and let Canvas search for Gradescope and select then "Gradescope" from the results list.

See how to sync Canvas and Gradescope.
(And ignore those parts below that only apply when you do not sync with Canvas...)

The Computer Science department of the Iðnaðarverkfræði-, vélaverkfræði- og tölvunarfræðideild (IVT) of Verkfræði- og náttúruvísindasvið (VON) uses already since 2015 Gradescope for an easy online assignment submission by students and for extremely convenient and time-saving online grading and feedback by teachers.

Both students and teachers love it (e.g. in the 2019 IVT self-evaluation, the students explicitly requested more usage of Gradescope and independent from that the teachers requested IVT deild to spend money to get a full license). IVT deild has paid for a full-feature institutional license that everyone who registers with hi.is email can use for free in 2020. (Update: due to COVID-2019, Gradescape just made all features anyway available for free.)

The approach of Gradescope is that you can keep your traditional approach (so changing to Gradescope is really easy):

• For assignments/homework during the semester, students upload on their own their solutions: either taking a photo of their paper solution or (as anyway most students typeset their solution electronically) upload a PDF of their solution, and mark on their own where on the uploaded pages the solution can be found.
• Final exams are done as usual on paper, but the teacher defines boxes where to fill in the answers so that Gradescope knows where to look for the answers and the teacher scans later in and uploads the exam solutions to be able to use the convenient online grading features.
• In addition, pure online assignments/exams are supported, i.e. instead of uploading a solution, students answer some web form.

Image copied from https://www.gradescope.com/

If you have any questions, you are welcome to contact Helmut Neukirchen. But first have a look at the info below:

Demo videos (each 2-3 minutes):

Teacher creating assignment

Student submitting assignment

Teacher grading submission

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based image recognition to group solutions that look similar and should thus all get the same grading

E.g, in a course with 40 students, grade the 20 completely correct assignments with one click, the 10 assignments that make all the same mistake with one click, and the 5 empty assignments with one click, so that only the remaining 5 assignments need your attention.

Gradescope is easy

As you see, this is all very easy and a natural (but faster) extension of your paper-based assignment workflow.

(Note that my experience is based on Computer Science assignments and exams, where answers typically fit on one page, but grading is even fun for programming assignments where source code submissions are long. But if you scroll one page down on https://www.gradescope.com, you see also Gradescope being applied to other disciplines than Computer Science.)

As long as not every course uses Canvas, students need to be manually added to their Gradescope course.

• Either let students enroll themselves, by letting the students know about an entry code (Gradescope generates it: everyone can register with this code for your course)
• or you as teacher manually upload the list of students as comma-separated values (CSV) format: just export in UGLA your student list in Microsoft Excel format, open in a spreadshet, export there as CSV and upload to Gradescope (double check that names containing special Icelandic characters are correct, i.e. try different CSV exports such as Unicode characterset).

Teacher adds students to course roster

Entry code for students to self-enroll (no video, screenshot only)

You can also add dæmakennarar/teaching assistants (TAs) to a course to let them grade using Gradescope: you just need to clarify who grades what or create separate courses for each TA. (While Gradescope supports the notion of sections=dæmatími groups, sections can currently only be set when populating the roster via CSV, but not web-based using entry code or a teacher later adding single students.)

Getting started

If you want give Gradescope a try, just go to https://www.gradescope.com, sign up (select University of Iceland and use your hi.is email address), create a dummy course and assignment. If you like, you can also add a dummy student using your private email address and play around.

The above features are only the most basic features of Gradescope, for more check:

• Help videos
• Help pages

For your info: IVT deild has paid for the Institution license, i.e. you have all features. (Except for the integration with Canvas that we can only do next semester when all course use Canvas.)

While we paid for 1500 students only, we are allowed to have as many students as we need in 2020 (in 2021, we might then have to pay for the number of students of 2020, so either HÍ as a whole adopts Gradescope or IVT deild convinces Gradescope that 2020 was exceptional -- they anyway started to give out free licenses because of COVID-19).

Our new colleague Morris Riedel gave on 7. February 2020 a presentation on Quantum Computing (slides / video) at UTmessan 2020, Icelands biggest IT fair. In addition, the Computer Science Department ran on the public visitor day (8. February 2020) a booth: beside student projects, we showcased research projects, e.g. DEEP-EST.

Morris Riedel talking about Quantum Computing

The booth of the Computer Science department, showcasing student projects.

The booth of the Computer Science department, showcasing research projects.

The DEEP-EST project

Showcasing the DEEP-EST project

For showcasing the machine learning that we do in the DEEP-EST project, we offer a web page that allows you to use the camera of your smartphone (or laptop) to detect objects in real-time. While neural networks are still best trained on a supercomputer, such as DEEP-EST with its Data Analysis Module, the trained neural network even runs in the browser of a smartphone.

Just open the following web page and allow your browser to use the camera: https://nvndr.csb.app/.

(Allow a few seconds for loading the trained model and initialisation.)

The used approach is Single Shot Detector (SSD) (the percentage shows how sure the neural network is about the classification) using the MobileNet neural network architecture. The dataset used for training is COCO (Common Objects in Context), i.e. only objects of the labeled object classes contained in COCO will get detected. The Javascript code that is running in your browser uses Tensorflow Lite and its Object Detection API and model zoo.

Example object detection via neural network

If you want learn more about DEEP-EST, have a look at the poster below (click on the picture below for PDF version):

As the Department of Computer Science is hidden within the Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science, the visibility of the Department of Computer Science is somewhat hindered, in particular when navigating from the University of Iceland's home page.

The University of Iceland has some Icelandic and English web pages specific to our study programmes. The question to be investigated is whether at least a Google search for the Icelandic terms Tölvunarfræði, Hugbúnaðarverkfræði, Reikniverkfræði, and English terms Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computational Engineering yield the study programmes of the Department of Computer Science at University of Iceland.

Therefore, you find below the Google search results for these search words, using Google search (from an Icelandic client IP address which heavily influences the search results) on 11.11.2019. According to Google's page cache, https://uni.hi.is/helmut was last visited 8 Nov 2019 16:33:03 GMT, so the search results documented by screenshots below are most likely based on the that date, i.e. before this blog post was created.

If you read this page later, you are welcome to compare (assuming you browse with an Icelandic IP address as this influences Google's search results) whether the search results changed (to some extent this might then be due the links contained in this blog post and you might call this search engine optimisation).

Update 13.11.2019: According to Google's page cache, Google has visited on 12.11.2019 this blog entry and on 13.11.2019, the order of search results did not really change (except that for the search term Computer Science, the first hit that used to be a Wikipedia page disappeared and instead, a Feature Snippet appeared and thus, all other hits got one place better; for Software Engineering, the first two hits pointing to Wikipedia's entries for Software Engineer and Software Engineering swapped places). As the search results did not change significantly, I added therefore on 13.11.2019 a few more links pointing to University of Iceland study programme web pages.

Update 14.11.2019: According to Google's page cache, Google has visited this page again on 13.11.2019 (Google's crawling adapted to the frequency of updates of my page) and on 14.11.2019, however this seems to have been before the 13.11.2019 update. Still, the ordering for some search results has changed: For the search term Hugbúnaðarverkfræði, the University of Iceland's page on Hugbúnaðarverkfræði climbed up from 2nd to 1st place. Also for the search term Software Engineering, the University of Iceland PhD programme page got a push (even though it is not linked at all in this blog post).
One explanation might be that this blog seems to have a small influence Google's search results (the order for search term Hugbúnaðarverkfræði changed, but not for search term Computer Science). A single page having such an influence could be explained by the small number of web pages referring to the University of Icelandic web pages for the study programmes Tölvunarfræði/Computer Science, Hugbúnaðarverkfræði/Software Engineering, Reikniverkfræði/Computational Engineering.
Another explanation would be that the Google page ranking algorithm was changed at the same time. Future work would be to repeat this experiment with links to the respective PhD programme pages that are currently not linked at all in this blog post.

Search result for Tölvunarfræði

On 11.11.2019, the Google search for Tölvunarfræði gives as first hit the University of Iceland page for Tölvunarfræði that is linked in this blog post:

Search result for Hugbúnaðarverkfræði

On 11.11.2019, the Google search for Hugbúnaðarverkfræði gives as second hit the University of Iceland page for Hugbúnaðarverkfræði that is linked in this blog post:

Search result for Reikniverkfræði

On 11.11.2019, the Google search for Reikniverkfræði gives as second hit the University of Iceland page for Reikniverkfræði that is linked in this blog post:

Search result for Computer Science

(Note: scrolled beyond a Featured Snippet box.)

On 11.11.2019, the Google search for Computer Science gives as fourth hit (after scrolling) the University of Iceland page for Computer Science that is linked in this blog post:

Search result for Software Engineering

(Note: scrolled beyond a Featured Snippet, People also ask, and a Video box.)

On 11.11.2019, the Google search for Software Engineering gives as fourth hit (after scrolling) the University of Iceland page for Software Engineering that is linked in this blog post:

Search result for Computational Engineering

(Note: scrolled beyond a Featured Snippet and a Video box.)

On 11.11.2019, the Google search for Computational Engineering gives as second hit (after scrolling) the University of Iceland page for Computational Engineering that is linked in this blog post:

Shahbaz Memon successfully defended his PhD thesis in Computer Science on Standards-based Models and Architectures to Automate Scalable and Distributed Data Processing and Analysis. The thesis covers Scientific Workflows and middlewares for High-Performance Computing and High-Throughput Computing.

This PhD is an example of the collaboration between the Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science and Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC).

Members of the PhD commitee were Morris Riedel, Helmut Neukirchen, and Matthias Book, opponents were Ramin Yahyapour and Robert Lovas. The head of faculty, Rúnar Unnþórsson, was steering the defense. While we have some on cultural diversity involved, we need to improve on gender diversity! More photos can be found on flickr.

Hannes Pétur Eggertsson successfully defended his PhD thesis in Computer Science on GraphTyper: A pangenome method for identifying sequence variants at a population-scale. I had the honor to steer this defense in my role as vice head of faculty.

As you notice, only men are occurring here. We need to improve on this! More pictures can be found on flickr.

Update 28.3.2022: I just finished working on a new LaTeX template using the new HÍ corporate identity from 10/2021.

But you can also download the new LaTeX template for (M.Sc.) theses UniversityOfIcelandMScThesisV2.0.1 and for PhD thesis: uiphdthesis_V2.0.0.zip

I have submitted it to Overleaf as a template.

For more info on the new layout, see my newer post.

The PhD thesis template has also been updated: uiphdthesis_V2.1.0.zip. If you started already your PhD thesis, it is in principle enough to

1. replace the old ui-phdthesis.cls by the new one and
2. replace the two files HIlogo.pdf and UIblueribbon.pdf by banner.png
3. add \thesislicense{All rights reserved} to your .tex file (or update to the license you want to make your thesis available).
4. Also check the comments at the start of file uiphd_template.tex for possible further additions (\numberwithin and \UrlBreaks).
5. In contrast to Version 2.0.0. version 2.1.0 moved the bibliography management out of the cls file into the tex file where BibLaTeX is now used

You find the templates also at https://gitlab.com/uice.

Official templates for PhD theses and MSc theses at the School of Engineering and Natural Sciences are available the School's new Intranet. I try to get my template added there.

If you need for some reason, the template using the old design: LaTeX template MSc: UniversityOfIcelandMScThesisV11.zip Version 1.1. from 15.10.2020.)

I have created some slides on pros and cons of using LaTeX (skip them, if you are familiar with LaTeX), as well as a brief introduction into LaTeX (starting from slide 13, the thesis template is covered -- but this refers to the old Vesion 1.x template), and a brief introduction into BibLatex for handling literature references.

For the PhD template, a different LaTeX template is available which includes a README.

This PhD template needs fixes as well, e.g.:

• Table of contents page numbers are sometimes not right-justified due to using "\ " instead of "~": Change {\ \titlerule*[.5pc]{.}\ \thecontentspage to {\ \titlerule*[.5pc]{.}~\thecontentspage
• IIRC, the same comment as above for \markboth applies.
• IIRC, there was also something concerning \renewcommand{\leftmark}{\normalfont\footnotesize\sffamily\nouppercase{List of Publications}} % HN commented out vs. %\renewcommand{\rightmark}{\normalfont\footnotesize\sffamily\nouppercase{List of Publications}}
• When including papers, run them first through PDFcrop and if the pages have different size, e.g. last page of a two column paper uses only one column, take care to use the same cropping for all pages. The PDFcrop is needed because typically the original PDF (e.g. your camera-ready version of your paper) contains, e.g. an A5 sized paper on A4 paper format and since the thesis is printed in A5, the paper gets scaled down so that the original A5-sized paper becomes a tiny A6 which is too tiny!
• There were more issue (note to self: do a diff on some of the students templates and the one in the zip).

For your slides, Katrín Halldórsdóttir created a LaTeX Beamer template (the tex file is GPL, however the logos are property of the University).

Note for those using Overleaf: there is now Writefull for grammar checking of English language that integrates with Overleaf as a plugin for the Firefox an Chrome browser.

Independent from that, there is the free and open-source standalone TeXtidote grammar checker that can be run from command-line or, e.g. Emacs.

I will be in research sabbatical in autumn 2016 and thus focus on research without any teaching obligations.

Typically, I would have taught then HBV101F Software Maintenance. Currently, it is planned that it is taught one year later in autumn 2017. Students who would have needed to take that course in autumn 2016 can get an exemption and take another course instead.

If anyone wants to start a new M.Sc. thesis during that time, I will only accept topics with a strong research focus thus leading to a publication at an international conference, for example related to big-data processing with Apache Spark.

Note from 2023: the text below is partly outdated. On Ugla, SENS has pretty good info on the timelines and the webforms to be filled out, i.e. ignore the timelines and webforms mentioned below.

The official regulations are in articles 7. and 8. of Regulation no. 994-2017 / Reglur um meistaranám við Verkfræði- og náttúruvísindasvið Háskóla Íslands, nr. 994/2017 (and article 69, items 9-15 of Regulation for the University of Iceland no. 569-2009 / Reglur fyrir Háskóla Íslands Nr. 569/2009. The text below should be in accordance -- if not, it needs to be updated... In charge of MSc. theses at VoN student service is Donna, reachable via the HÍ email user alias sensgraduate.

If you want to graduate, take care that latest in parallel to your Master's project, you finish all your coursework, e.g. Software Engineering students have three mandatory HBV courses. If you are a student coming from non-Computer Science/non-Software Engineering Bachelor, you typically have to take extra courses as part of there admission to the Master's program!

A Master's thesis needs:

• A supervisor (i. leiðbeinandi): Supervises the student during the whole thesis project.
• An M.Sc. committee (i. meistaraprófsnefnd) consisting of the supervisor and at least one other person who needs to have an MSc. degree -- typically another university teacher -- (unofficially called "secondary supervisor" (i. meðleiðbeinandi)): Often just gets into the game once the student is almost finished (internally, 10% of the overall supervision efforts assumed, but may be up to 25% and 50%), i.e. has a more or less final draft of the thesis available. Gives comments to improve your draft. So this person should be somewhat familiar with the topic.
• An external thesis examiner (i. prófdómari): If possible, should be from outside HÍ (in the old days, that person was from the faculty and thus often the old English term "faculty representative" is used. Use in your English thesis the official translation External examiner). That person needs a final draft (release candidate status) before the defense, but must not otherwise be involved in the supervision.

Two web forms needs to be filled out latest 1 week before the defense by the supervisor to book a defense: one for advertising the defense, one for appointing the external examiner (the web forms can be reached via VoN intranet page in UGLA).
There, all the information that are needed (name, title, abstract (for writing an abstract, see also item 4 from Kent Beck), day, supervisors, a photo of the student that will be used for advertising -- but more recently, it seems that the photo is anyway not used, etc.) have to be provided.

To make it for the next graduation ceremony (i. brautskráning) which is in February and June each year (there is till some deadline in October, but no ceremony), there is a deadline (latest 3 weeks before the graduation ceremony for which obviously all the grades need to be handed in). A few days before that deadline, there is typically an event called meistaradagurinn where the idea is that all the students of the faculty defend their thesis. Someone organises this and needs to be contacted to participate. But of course, it is also possible to defend a thesis on another day than on meistaradagurinn.

The schedule of the defense is as follows (meistaradagurinn: typically 45 minutes for talk and discussion, but there is 60 minutes time between defenses to allow time for setting up the presentation):

• A few introducing words by the supervisor (including an explanation of the procedure).
• 20-30 minutes presentation of the thesis by the student. No need to be nervous: you know best about your topic and thesis (also, your supervisor would not allow you to defend if you would likely fail)! Learn the introducing words (to get your presentation started fluently) and the concluding words (to avoid an abrupt termination of your talk) by heart.
• Max. 15 minutes questions from the audience (Note: in practise, 5 minutes for the audience and 10 minutes for internal discussion is best)
• The audience leaves the room, only the student and the three teachers remain. Now some more private discussion (what was good/bad) and further questions are possible.
• Finally, the student leaves the room and the teachers discuss the grade (e.g. using a grading scheme) for the thesis and after this, the student is called in again and is told the grade.

Note that the grade is filled into some form that needs to be signed by those involved in grading when using the above web form, this gets prepared by the administration based on the above web form (typically, a PDF of the form is sent to the main supervisor via e-mail by Sigríður Sif Magnúsdóttir a few days before the defense).

Based on the comments that are given during defense, some minor changes to thesis might be required.
Students need to submit an electronic copy of their thesis latest three weeks before (so that you can send the confirmation of submitting before the deadline) the next graduation ceremony (i. brautskráning) to skemman.is (printed version not required anymore, nor is an ISBN number required: remove that line if it is part of your thesis template). Student should also simultaneously need to fill out an declaration of access. The declaration of access template is accessible in English and Icelandic. For commercial settings, access to the thesis can be closed (but not for longer than 4 years); if the thesis is closed, please send the final PDF as well to your supervisors, because they can otherwise neither access it.

If the thesis is accepted, the student will receive an e-mail confirming this. The student must send the confirmation from skemman to sensgraduate at hi.is or to Sigríður Sif Magnúsdóttir by email (before the deadline where all grades for brautskráning need to be available). There is also an UGLA page on brautskráning that hopefully is still available when you read this...

To allow the supervisors to read and comment on the thesis, a first draft needs to be finished in time:

• First draft for the supervisor: latest 1 month before the defense. Preferably, use an agile approach of delivering early drafts as soon as a new chapter is finished. (Do not start with the Introduction -- that is often the last chapter written.)
• Release candidate draft for the co-supervisor and "prófdómari" latest 1 week before the defense, better much earlier. This deadline applies also for filling out the above mentioned web form.
• Poster needs to be printed latest 1 day before defense on Meistaradagurinn (e.g., Háskólaprent does this within 15-30 minutes).

If you finish your thesis in August/September/October you may not need to pay tuition fees for the new academic year.

There is an UGLA page with the various deadlines of the graduation process.

Templates for thesis, presentation, and poster

Note: Since 10/2021, HÍ has a new corporate identity that is covered here:

• A MS Word template, but I really recommend using the LaTeX templates for writing the thesis. As "Advisors", list first your supervisor and in the next line the secondary/co-supervisors. Note that while the template may contain an ISBN number, you have to remove that line as nowadays, everything is electronic only. Have a look at some older MSc. theses to get an idea of the typical contents.
• For the defense, a PPT slide template is available on the HÍ corporate design web page -> Hönnunarstaðall (at top right corner) -> Rafrænar einingar ->PowerPoint (and then the download is at the bottom). If you want to rather use LateX for your presentation, Katrín Halldórsdóttir created a LaTeX Beamer template that however is using the old 2010 corporate design (the tex file is GPL, however the logos are property of the University). Any volunteers to update it to the new design?
• Furthermore, a poster is displayed on Meistaradagurinn (if defense is on a different day, you are still supposed to prepare a poster to be displayed later on Meistaradagurinn). You find templates with the new 2021 look on the HÍ corporate design web page -> Hönnunarstaðall (at top right corner) -> Prentmiðlar -> Veggspjöld (and then the download is at the bottom). However, that template contained in the ppt download is not very helpful -- you rather would need the provided Adobe InDesign template. As most will not have a license for Adobe InDesign, I provide here a PPT template that has been converted from the Adobe InDesign template. Note that you need to download all fonts of the the Google fonttype family "Jost" and install them (if you have it not installed, PowerPoint will use another font, but the printshop that probably has the Jost font and then, the layout does not match anymore).
  I suggest to use a smaller fontsize than in the template: compare with the fontsize used in the PPT template using the old look (but note that the old template uses A0 page size, while the new one uses A4 pages size -- which will then be scaled up when printed in, e.g., A0. Hence, display both side by side for comparison.)
  You should also refer to that old template to get an idea of the typical contents, such as adding the names of the supervisors, etc. As a backup, I provide here a copy of that old template.
  Háskolaprent can print the poster (typically in A0 size).

Note that our School of Engineering and Natural Sciences offers a Course on thesis skills such as writing (and you even get ECTS credit points for it). In addition, you will find on the web other general information on thesis writing.

When running CORBA remote objects in a NAT environment (assuming Internet protocols are used), the IIOP IOR remote object references that will be created (and registered at some nameservice) will contain the private IP address (to convince yourself: dump the IOR as string and paste that string in http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/ILU/parseIOR/). As a result, when a client outside the NAT environment looks up the IOR, it will get one containing the private IP and access to the remote object does of course not work. For the Oracle OpenJDK CORBA implementation, the following command line parameter needs to be provided to both the ORB and the JVM running at the remote object side:
-ORBServerHost PublicIPofServer

Concerning the ports:
By default, the Oracle OpenJDK is using TCP port 1049 for the activation service. You can change this port via the ORB command line parameter -port.

The port used for the CORBA Naming Service (which is automatically provided by the OpenJDK Java ORB) depends on whether orbd is started as root or as an ordinary user: when started as root, TCP port 900 is used, otherwise TCP port 1049 (because ports lower than 1024 can only be created by root). Unfortunately, TCP port 1049 is also used by the activation service as described above. Hence, a port collision (=exceptions) will occur (what a stupid design)!
In this case, let the ORB start the Naming Service e.g. on TCP port 1050:
orbd -ORBInitialPort 1050

When changing the Naming Service port from the default 900, client and server JVMs that use that Naming Service also need to know about the changed Naming Service port number: Start the JVMs with additional parameter:
java -ORBInitialPort 1050

When running client and server on different hosts, take care that they use the same Naming Service. Assuming that the Naming Service running on the server's host is used: the server will anyway use this local Naming Service, but the client needs to know the hostname of the server's Naming Service: start the client JVM with additional parameter:
java -ORBInitialHost nameserverhost

Note that in addition to these standard services (Activation and Naming), CORBA uses by default dynamically assigned TCP ports (=expect difficulties with firewalls) for all further objects such as your own remote objects that are contained in the IORs. However, you can enforce a port to be used by a servant created within a JVM using the additional parameter:
java -ORBServerPort port