Crafting the Presentation

Logistics

This document should serve as a guide for when you create your presentation.

Your presentation slot will be 20 minutes total:

  • 15 minutes for content
  • 5 minutes for questions from the audience

Note that you need to be able to effectively cover this paper in 15 minutes. This means that you must distill the content of the paper into a form that you can present within the time allotted. When giving presentations at academic venues, work, etc., it is important to respect the amount of time you are given, i.e., don’t go over time. I will give you warnings for when 5, 10, 12, and 14 minutes have passed in order to help you keep your presentation on track.

WARNING: However, I will unceremoniously usher you to finish your presentation for the sake of keeping our schedule. And I will notice if you start rushing through your slides in order to get through your content, and that will adversely affect your grade.

How to Craft Your Presentation

Read the Paper

Especially if the paper you’re reading is outside your area of expertise, it can be helpful to have a strategy for reading the paper.

For example, I like to read the abstract, introduction, and then conclusion. This gives me an idea of the high-level ideas of the paper, e.g., what problem are they trying to solve, how they solved it, and what metrics they used to compare their work to the state-of-the-art (SOTA).

Then, I’ll skim the paper in its entirety. Often, I get bogged down into every last detail when I read scientific material; to combat this when reading papers, I’ll tell myself to read the entire paper and only let myself spend a few minutes on something I may not understand upon first read. I do make a note of such points in the paper so that I can revisit them in a future read of the paper. (Additionally, sometimes the information or extra context I needed to understand the paper just happened to be a sentence or two after the sentence I was stuck on!) This skimming of the paper gives a little more specific insight into the motivation of the problem and how they solved the problem they present.

Finally, I do a much more fine-grained reading of the paper and let myself sit with pencil and paper, working out any mathematical formalisms, filling in missing parts of a derivation, sketching any drawings, etc. Whatever I need to do in order to try to understand the prose.

Reflect on what you read

  • What was the paper about?
  • What problem were they trying to solve?
  • Did they convince you that they did a good job?
    • Why or why not?
  • What were the strengths and weaknesses of the paper?
  • What, if anything, would you have done differently?
    • Often this is a good question to ask when you are
      • looking to expand upon the work
      • doing a literature review for on-going research and point out deficiencies that you address in your own efforts

Elements of a successful presentation

  • Conveying the problem the authors are trying to solve
  • Understanding the motivation well enough to relay that to the class
  • Effectively contextualize the work
    • use the related work and background sections that papers often use to do this very thing
  • Guide us through the methods/experimental design used to solve the presented problem(s)
  • Show the results and tell us how they reflect they reflect the methods and experimental design
  • Conclude by giving us a recap of the paper and your general opinions