Research Seminar – CPIT 695 Presentation 1

Presentation Skills Improve your English ASAP: the spoken word (ear, mouth); the written word (eyes, pen / keyboard). Read books about technical writing: The Elements of Style (Strunk and White) A Handbook for Scholars (Van Leunen) Towards Clarity and Grace (Williams) How to Write Mathematics (Steenrod) Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing (Morrell)

Presentation Skills Think backwards: what do you want people to remember from your talk? Don’t say everything. Simplify. Rumour: people can only remember 5 new things from a talk. Rule of thumb Of course rules are made to be broken, but still: be aware of which message you want to send, and what you want your audience to remember. Make at least one point comprehensively.

Presentation Skills: The Plan Planning is not like playing Lego. It reflects your understanding, and thus it evolves with time. You should not plan your talk in the same chronological order as you carried out your research. You probably chose a logical plan for the paper. Choose a pedagogical plan for the presentation (i.e., one adapted to the audience, the duration of the talk, etc.). Before the talk Try to immerse yourself in what you are going to say (e.g., by giving the talk to yourself).

How to present? Basics Making your presentation What is the ‘take-away message’? Keep in clear and simple and not overly complex Know your audience to explain the ‘take-away message’ appropriately Know your subject well. Be prepared to say “I don’t know”. Understand the configurations of the venue Generally people take slightly less than a minute per slide. But, experiment your own pace Making your presentation Provide the outline of your presentation Start your presentation with introduction Explain the essence of your ‘take-away message’ Finally, recap the ‘take-away message’

How to present? Preparing Slides One idea per slide Write text as newspaper headlines The summary of the slide should be the title of that slide Use simple block diagrams If graphs are used, label them and explain the meaning behind the variables Final Words Relax Don’t block the projection Don’t memorize or read from prepared text Keep control over questions; make sure not to be dragged of

Generic Layout of Conference Talk Title/author/affiliation (1 slide) Forecast (1 slide) Give gist of problem attacked and insight found (What is the one idea you want people to leave with? This is the "abstract" of an oral presentation.) Outline (1 slide) Give talk structure. Some speakers prefer to put this at the bottom of their title slide. (Audiences like predictability.) Background Motivation and Problem Statement (1-2 slides) (Why should anyone care? Most researchers overestimate how much the audience knows about the problem they are attacking.) Related Work (0-1 slides) Cover superficially or omit; refer people to your paper.

Generic Layout of Conference Talk Methods (1 slide) Cover quickly in short talks; refer people to your paper. Results (4-6 slides) Present key results and key insights. This is main body of the talk. Its internal structure varies greatly as a function of the researcher's contribution. (Do not superficially cover all results; cover key result well. Do not just present numbers; interpret them to give insights. Do not put up large tables of numbers.) Summary (1 slide) Future Work (0-1 slides) Optionally give problems this research opens up. Backup Slides (0-3 slides) Optionally have a few slides ready (not counted in your talk total) to answer expected questions. (Likely question areas: ideas glossed over, shortcomings of methods or results, and future work.)

What is a good paper presentation? Shoulders of giants... what previous research does this work build on?  What are the key underlying theoretical ideas?  Software infrastructure? Impact has this work been influential?  When later research papers cite it, what contribution is being referred to?   Discussion points End with questions which you think should arise

Presentation Skills It is harder to ask a sensible question than to supply a sensible answer. (Persian proverb) How to handle a Question: The goal is to communicate. Show that you understand the question. Are you able to repeat the question? You may even need to restate it. Only answer it once you both agree about it. Then you will truly communicate.

Presentation Skills Conducting the talk Straighten up. Face the audience. Convey that you are happy to be here. Dare to speak slowly and loudly. Accept that in the end, by giving a talk, you express who you are.

Presentation Skills Recommendations: be very well prepared, and be ready to have fun and to learn new things. Also, beware that someone (e.g., your host) might shanghai your talk. Don’t: overestimate your audience: you probably have spent more time thinking about your problem than most people here; underestimate your audience: there is always the risk that a world specialist is here. underestimate yourself: you come from a good university and you are well-prepared; overestimate yourself: prepare your talk well.

Handling Questions The golden rule still applies: ALWAYS repeat the question. It gives you time to identify its nature. Technical question: give a technical answer. Friendly question: use it to make your point even better. Challenging question: be upfront.

How to present a paper (at a conference) Do unto others as you would have them do unto you Objectives, in decreasing order of importance Keep people awake and attentive everything has been tried: play fiddle, cartoons, jokes in most cases, extreme measures should not be needed humor can help Get the problem definition across people in audience may not be working on your problem

How to present a paper (at a conference) Objectives … in decreasing order of importance Explain your general approach most productive use of your time Dirty details most people in the audience probably do not care a typical conference includes 30+ paper presentations, yours could be the N-th

Talk outline or not ? Useful when several ideas discussed in a single talk Short talks : Skip the outline Long talks : Include an outline Make the outline interesting

Text You want people to (quickly) read your slides Use big enough font Do not put too much on one slide don’t want to keep them busy reading, instead of listening Use good color schemes Not blue on yellow

Text Slide text need not be grammatically accurate Keep it short OK to omit some details fill them in when you present the paper Practice makes perfect versus Practice can improve your presentations

PowerPoint, but not excessively Everybody has used PowerPoint No one is impressed by fancy backgrounds anymore Avoid using gratuitous animation Standard PowerPoint layouts can be useful decent font sizes and color schemes

Picture is worth 1000 words Use illustrations to explain complex algorithms Omit minor details, focus on the important They can read the paper to know the exact algorithm

Short talks May not have enough time to discuss all ideas clearly Focus talk on one or two ideas Summarize rest briefly Better to explain one idea well, than many ideas poorly

How to present a paper Avoid blocking the screen Point to the screen, rather than the slide on the projector Practice makes perfect (or tolerable) May need several trials to fit your talk to available time particularly if you are not an experienced speaker

How many slides? Depends on personal style Rules of thumb 1 slides for 1-2 minutes Know your pace I tend to make more slides than I might need, and skip the not-so-important ones dynamically Anticipate technical questions, and prepare explanatory slides

If English is your second language Accent may not be easy to understand Talk slowly Easier said than done I have a tough time slowing down myself

No substitute for experience Nothing like a terrible presentation to learn what not to do Try to learn from other people’s mistakes, instead of waiting for your own

Summary Use common sense Learn from experience Enjoy! Papers can be fun

References CPIT 695 Notes of Dr. Ahmad Barnawi Materials to refer: Slides on “On Presenting a Scientific Talk” by Olivier Danvy http://cs.au.dk/~danvy/tips-and-tricks/index.html http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/conference-talk.html http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~honavar/grad-advice.html http://faculty.washington.edu/heagerty/Courses/b572/lecture2012.htm Using Latex Beamer, Prosper: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/latex.html