Ph.D. confirmation process (formerly M.Phil/Ph.D. transfer)

The confirmation viva

In CVSSP, most people are encouraged to take their confirmation viva at the end of their first year. The viva normally lasts about 30 - 40 minutes. The examining panel usually consists of the CVSSP professors, and an external assessor. Normally your supervisor(s) will also be consulted. You should give a presentation lasting about 15 mins. of your work to date. This is followed by questions from the panel.

Guidelines for confirmation reports

The report must not exceed 30 pages in total. Please do not try to bypass this by using small font, dense writing or small margins. Any appendices must be within the overall page limit. You should use 12 pt font, double spacing and about 2-2.5 cm margin all round. There is no template provided - it should be a simple document. These Latex commands will give the right effect:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{a4wide}
\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{1.6}
\begin{document}
.....
.....

A confirmation report should have roughly the following structure:

1. An abstract
2. An Introduction that motivates the research and defines the problem that has to be solved (1-2 pages).
3. A brief literature survey. If you have done extensive Literature survey, perhaps you can issue it as Technical Report, separately. Often formulae lifted from different papers have different notation. It is your job to define your own unified notation, so that all equations you present follow this adopted notation.
4. Methodology. You may expand into details and formulae related to one or two of the methods you are going to explore in detail. Make sure you define all variables that appear in the equations.
5. Experimental results. Show some results of the method(s) you discussed in the previous section. The results could be preliminary but they should be presented in a scientific and critical way: objectively, with graphs with labelled axes, precise captions, large readable font.
6. Discussion and conclusions. Discuss the significance of your experimental results.
7. Achievements so far. (About half a page). Briefly state what you have achieved during your first year of study, identifying any original contributions you might have made, any pieces of code you developed, any technical report you produced, etc.
8. Future work. (1-2 pages). This is perhaps the most important part of the report. Think carefully what you plan to do. Be specific. Avoid platitudes and grandiose ideas. Present exactly what you will do and make sure that it is feasible in the remaining two years. It will be useful to include some rough time schedule of the work.
9. References. List them in alphabetical order. Make sure they are complete. To decide what a complete reference is, look at the way references are presented at the end of journal papers. If possible, avoid references just to web pages: they often change or disappear. All references must be mentioned in the text. If they have 1 or 2 authors, both authors must be mentioned in the text. If they have 3 or more authors the paper should be mentioned by the name of the first author followed by "et al.". However, in the reference list always all authors must be included.
10. Appendices. You may include some appendices if you wish to give your program listings or the program flow chart or some intricate Maths. Do not put your results in the appendix. They are your showpiece and they should always be in the main text. All appendices should be referred to in the main text and they should be numbered according to the order by which they are mentioned in the main text. Any appendices must be within the overall page limit.