Presentations
All students enrolled in, or auditing, the course will be required to present
one or more papers from the reading list. As the presenter, you will
be responsible both for communicating the facts of the paper, as well as leading
the class' discussion about the paper.
Here are the requirements regarding presentations:
- All presentations must be in powerpoint, pdf, slitex, or some other suitable
presentation format.
- Each paper presentation should be approximately 30 minutes, unless otherwise
noted.
- Each presenter must meet with one or more of the course instructors,
no later than the Friday preceding your scheduled presentation. You
must prepare a complete draft presentation for this pre-class meeting, and
bring that copy to the meeting. The goal of this meeting is to go over your
presentation for both style and substance. Many of the papers we will be reading
have been presented recently in conferences. You may get lucky and be able
to locate slides, figures, or other materials for your presentation on the
authors WWW site.
- You must e-mail your presentation to the instructors no more than 48 hours
before your class presentation. The instructors will post your presentation
for other students in the class before your presentation
- In addition to presenting the contents of each paper, you should also
present a critical analysis of the paper. What were the strengths
of the paper? What were the weaknesses? How could the paper be improved? Most
importantly, what future work is suggested by this paper? Such suggested future
work is a prime candidate for a course project. All presentations are required
to have at least one slide (more are welcome) each on strengths, weaknesses/improvements,
future work.
When you are presenting the paper, you will be leading the class.
Thus it is important that you are prepared (see pre-class meeting above) and
that you have prepared a good (interesting, thought-provoking, stylistically
excellent) talk, with careful attention to the rules of good public speaking.
There are a number of good on-line sources about "How to give a god talk".
We suggest strongly that you read one or more of the following before
beginning to prepare your presentation:
- "The Short Talk," Charles Van Loan, http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cv/ShortTalk.htm
- "Pointers on Giving a Talk," D. Messerschmitt http://cusg.eecs.berkeley.edu/~messer/Bad_talk.html
- "Tips for Preparing Scientific Presentation," ONR http://www.onr.navy.mil/onr/speak/prep.htm
