Sensys writing style

SenSys Writing Style

A SenSys paper reads as an engineer's argument: here is a sensing or embedded problem that hurts in a specific way, here is why existing systems fail on constrained hardware, here is the mechanism I built, and here is its measured behavior. The house style rewards concreteness — energy in joules, latency in a distribution, uptime in days — and penalizes the adjective ("lightweight," "efficient") that stands in for a measurement.

The first-page arc

Put the system on the first page. The abstract and opening paragraph should already carry:

1. The sensing/deployment pain — the physical problem, stated so a systems reader feels it.
2. Why existing systems fail — each prior approach's failure named specifically, in embedded terms (dies mid-inference, exhausts the energy budget, needs an unavailable radio).
3. The mechanism — what you built, in one or two sentences, with the constraint it respects.
4. The measured behavior — the headline numbers (energy, latency, accuracy under real conditions), each tied to how it was measured.

The worked example in ../../resources/worked-examples/01-introduction.md walks a before→after of exactly this arc for a batteryless classifier.

Numbers, not adjectives

The single highest-leverage edit in a SenSys draft is replacing evaluative adjectives with measured quantities.

Weak (adjective)	Strong (SenSys)
"Our system is low-power."	"Draws 42 µA average at a 1% duty cycle, measured with a shunt at 10 kHz."
"Inference is fast on-device."	"Median 8 ms, 95th-percentile 21 ms, on the target Cortex-M4."
"The model is small."	"Quantized to 61 kB, peaking at 18 kB RAM on the MCU."
"We deployed for a long time."	"12 nodes over 47 days; two failed on day 9 (battery)."
"Accuracy is high."	"F1 0.9x against reference-instrument ground truth (App. A)."

Claim → measurement pairing

Every quantitative claim should point to the figure, table, or method that backs it. A reviewer should never meet a number they cannot trace. Keep a running map as you write:

Claim                                → Evidence
"survives power failures"            → Fig. 3 (termination across N brownouts)
"bounded end-to-end latency"         → Table 2 (latency CDF under harvest trace)
"matches wired accuracy"             → Table 3 (paired, same audio, App. A truth)
"projected 2-year lifetime"          → §4.3 (measured draw + battery spec, not datasheet)

If a claim has no evidence pointer, either measure it or soften it to what you can show.

Structure inside the double-column cap

The body (≤ 12 pages full / ≤ 6 short) holds the core logic; references and appendices are unlimited and outside the cap, so the body earns its space by carrying the argument, not the exhaustive protocol. Typical shape: motivation and system overview early; the mechanism and its constraint model in the middle; evaluation organized by the measurement axes (sensys-experiments) — energy, latency, accuracy, deployment — each answering a claim from the intro. Push full protocols, extra plots, and derivations to appendices (sensys-supplementary).

System-paper discipline

• Overview figure early. A systems reader wants the block diagram before the details; one clear architecture figure repays its page cost.
• Design decisions with their alternatives. State what you chose and what you rejected and why — SenSys reviewers read for whether you understood the design space.
• Honesty about limits. A named limitation (works only above a harvest threshold; degrades past N nodes) reads as competence; a paper with no limits reads as under-evaluated.
• No overclaiming. "Matches the baseline at lower energy" with error bars beats "outperforms" with none. Under-report and let the measurements carry it.

Revision checklist

[ ] The system is on the first page: pain → gap → mechanism → measured behavior.
[ ] Every "low-power / fast / small / accurate" replaced by a measured quantity.
[ ] Every quantitative claim has a figure/table/method pointer.
[ ] Energy and latency reported with method; latency as a distribution.
[ ] An architecture/overview figure appears before the mechanism details.
[ ] Design choices state their rejected alternatives.
[ ] Limitations named honestly; no unqualified "outperforms."
[ ] Body carries the argument; protocols and extra plots in the appendix.

Output format

[Arc]      first-page arc present? which of the four beats is missing
[Adjectives] list of adjective→measurement edits still needed
[Claims]   claims lacking an evidence pointer
[Energy]   energy/latency reported with method and distribution? pass/gap
[Open]     the one revision that would most raise the paper's systems credibility