paper presentation tips

8/8/2019 Paper Presentation Tips

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Tips for Paper Presentation

First, organize your talk:

1. Identify the important ideas: Your work (or the work you are presenting) likely

has many details but only one or two main ideas; structure your talk around these

main ideas.

2. Create a Talk Outline: Your talk should be organized in a top-down manner.

You should have the following main sections in your talk:

o Introduction, The Big Picture: what, why, how, and why we should care

(motivation). Be sure to include: a statement of the problem being solved (what)

motivation and putting the work in context (why and why should

we care)

a high-level view of the solution (how)

o Details of solution

o Results demonstrating/proving your solution

o Critique of Work (possibly compare to related work)

o Conclusions & Future Directions for this work

The talk should be organized as the important ideas first, the details second,

conclusions last. Each section of your talk should be organized in a similar manor:

high-level important points first, details second, summarize high-level points last.


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Next, Design your slides

1. Slide Organization Your slides should be organized like an outline--a few main

points, with sub points under each one. Your slides are a guide for your talk not a

word-for-word copy of your talk. List specific points that you want to talk about

as sub-topics of each main topic. If there are particular details that you want to

discuss, outline them on the slide and keep written notes for you to refer to in

your talk rather than writing all the details on the slide.

2. Summarize Main Points You should have a summary slide of the main ideas at

the end. If applicable, include a list of open questions and/or future directions of

your work.

3. It is okay to waste space Add just enough prose to present the main points and

highlight the main parts of each point. Use phrases rather than complete sentences

and use large fonts. You can use acronyms and abbreviations sparingly; however

you should say the complete name when you talk about them. For example, if you

abbreviate processes to procs on a slide, say "processes" when you talk about the

point not "procs". Similarly, if your create an acronym for your super fast multi-

cast implementation, SFMC, and refer to the old slow multi-cast implementation

as OSMC, then say "our super fast multi-cast" and "the old slow multi-cast" ratherthan "SFMC" and "OSMC". The exception is for well-known acronyms such as

PVM, MPI, API, JVM, etc.

4. A picture is worth a thousand words Use figures and graphs to explain

implementation and results. It is very hard to describe a system implementation

without having a picture of the components of the system.

5. Number of Slides As a general rule, it should take 2-3 minutes to talk through the

material on one slide, so for a 30 minute talk you should have about 13 slides.

6. If there are too many ideas in your work to present completely in 30 minutes, then

pick one or two (the most interesting/important parts) that you will discuss in

detail, and present the other parts at a higher level. Also, you can create back-up

slides for specific details that you don't plan to talk about, but may get questions

about.


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Next, preparing your presentation

1. Provide a talk road-map Tell the audience where you are going with your talk.

o Give audience a road-map of your talk at the beginning by using outline

slides immediately after the title slide, put up an outline slide and tell the

audience the main organization of your talk. Another alternative is to first

have a few slides motivating the paper's general topic, then put up an

outline slide giving the audience a road-map of your talk.

o It should be clear when you start a new high-level part of your talk

Use good transitions from one slide to the next and from one main topic to

the next..."We just talked about the implementation of foo now we will

look at how well foo performs for synthetic and real workloads.

You may want to use the outline slide at other points in your talk to

provide a visual transition between parts of your talk.

2. Repeat Your Point There is a rule that says you have to tell your audience

something three times before they really hear it:

1. Tell them what you are going to say.

2. Say it.

3. Summarize what you said.

This is particularly important for figures and graphs. For example:

4. This graph show how the A algorithm performs better than the B and C

algorithms as the number of nodes increase

5. The X axis is number of nodes, the Y axis is execution time in seconds

The red curve shows the execution time of A as the number of nodes

increases The blue curve shows ...

6. Thus you can see that as the number of nodes increases above N, the A

algorithm performs better. This is because of increased message traffic in

algorithms B and C as shown on the next slide...


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7. Talk to the Audience Don't read your slide off the screen, nor directly off

the projector. It is okay to stop for a second and refer to your notes if you

need to.

8. Practice Give a practice run-through of your talk in front of an audience

of at least one other student. Stand in a room for 30 minutes (or the

duration of your talk) and talk through all your slides (out loud). This

should be a timed dress rehearsal (don't stop and fix slides as you go and

don't let your audience ask questions or suggest fixes until your practice

talk is over; you want to force yourself to talk through your entire talk).

You should assume that there will be about 5-10 minutes worth of

questions during or after your talk. If your talk is too long, you should cutout some material to get it to fit into the time slot (your audience will not

mind if your talk ends 5 minutes early, but they sure will mind if it goes 5

minutes over). Even if it is not too long, you should think about slides that

you can skip during your talk if it ends up going too long.

As a practice talk audience member, you should jot down notes of places

in the talk where you have suggestions for improvements, or where

something seems unclear. After the presenter is done with his/her practice

talk, you should talk through the things you wrote down. It is also good to

give the presenter some practice answering audience questions. If you can

think of some questions like this, it is good to ask these to the presenter at

the end of his/her talk.

9. Nervousness: How to fight back

A well organized, practiced talk will almost always go well. If you

draw a blank, then looking at your slides will help you get back on

track.

Taking a deep breath will clam you down. One trick is to try to

remember to take a deep breath between each slide.


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Slow down. Take a few seconds to think about a question that is

being asked before you answer it. It is okay to pause for a few

seconds between points and between slides; a second or two of

silence between points is noticeable only to you, but if you are

talking a mile a minute everyone will notice.

Bring notes. If you are afraid that you will forget a point or will

forget your elegant transition between slides 11 and 12, write these

down on a piece of paper and bring it with you. However, you

don't want to have a verbatim copy of your talk, instead write

down key phrases that you want to remember to say.

Give at least one practice talk to an audience.

Be prepared to answer questions. You don't have to know the

answer to every question, however you should be prepared to

answer questions and able to answer most questions about your

work. Before you give the talk, think about what questions you are

likely to get, and how you would answer them. You may want to

have back-up slides ready for answering certain questions.

It is okay to say "I don't know" or better yet "gee, I hadn't thought

about that, but one possible approach would be to..." or to refer to

your notes to answer questions.

paper presentation tips

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