CPSC 514 - Presentation Guidelines
Introduction
As a part of CPSC 514 you will give a paper presentations in
class. The purpose of this exercise is to for you to practice
conference-style presentations, which is an important part of academic
life. Good conference presentations will make you well-known in the
research community and help you establish a reputation. Good
presentation skills will later help you find a job, be it in academia,
or in industry. There is no magic to this - it is a skill that can be
learned through practice.
This web page gives you a couple of hints on how to prepare your
presentation. It outlines a few of the most common pitfalls and how to
avoid them. If you need advice on how to prepare your specific paper,
please talk to me.
Format
A paper presentation in CPSC 514 is supposed to be "conference style",
in other words, it should take about 25 minutes with an additional
10-15 minutes of questions and discussion. I will usually fill in some
background material afterward. The presentation should make use of
presentation software such as Powerpoint, or a well-prepared PDF file
(see below). The blackboard should only be used in
the discussion - not for the actual presentation itself (you can't
really do this at a conference either!). You may make use of online
resources such as the videos that accompany the papers, or even
powerpoint slides of the original paper presentation. However
even when you make use of the original slides, you need to revise
them according to the tasks outlined below.
The content of the talk is typically two related papers. Sometimes one
paper will present a basic method, which is then improved by the
second paper. Other times the two papers describe competing approaches
to do the same thing. You will have to make a decision which parts of
the paper are important, and which ones are secondary. The 25 minutes
you have for the presentation should be allotted relative to this
importance.
You will also have to decide on the best structure for presenting the
tow papers. Sometimes, it may be best to present one paper first, and
then discuss the differences to the second paper afterwards. Other
times, it may be better to talk about both approaches in parallel
(i.e. subproblem 1 in paper a and paper b, then subproblem 2
etc.). No matter which format you choose, your task is to provide a
comparison of the two works, rather than just presenting on, then
the other.
If you have any doubt about which parts are important or how to
structure your presentations, then come to talk to me well in advance
of your scheduled presentation (several days before, at least!).
The exact layout of the talk is a matter of personal taste, but a
typical format is as follows:
- Introduction/Motivation:
what is the basic problem that the authors want to address?
- Related Work:
how does this work relate to other work? Relate the paper to other
papers that we have discussed in class. Do not just
list the previous work section of the paper here.
- Approach/Contributions:
the actual technical contributions of the paper. This is the longest
part of the presentation (15-20 minutes). Here you will have to make
tradeoffs about how much you can cover at what detail.
- Results:
discuss the quality of the results. Where possible, relate the results
to other work we have talked about. Search the web for images and/or
animations that you can show us at this point.
Once you get experienced with technical presentations, you will
develop your own style of preparing for them. However, if you don't
have a lot of experience so far, I recommend the following steps to
prepare:
- Read the papers you are to discuss well in advance of the actual
presentation (I recommend 1.5-2 weeks earlier at least). Try to figure
out what the important contributions are and how they are
achieved.
- Have a brief look at other papers we discuss just before yours
(the same week, or even in the same lecture). Chances are that they
are somehow related to your paper. If this is the case, read those
papers well enough to understand the core idea, and how they differ
from the one you discuss.
- If you now have any questions, come and talk to me.
- Start preparing your presentation. Think about the order in which
you want to talk about things (the best order for giving a
presentation is not always identical to the best order for writing a
paper). Start putting together the slides: text first, then draw some
figures, add any formulae you may need and images that you grab either
form the web or scan form the paper.
- Do a practice presentation to check the timing and to see if the
material makes sense the way you introduce it. Adjust the slides as
necessary.
- If English is not your first language, and you are inexperienced
in giving talks in English, then you might want to write out the full
presentation on paper and bring a copy to the presentation in case you
get stuck. Make sure you use a large font size or handwriting,
otherwise you won't find where you are during your talk.
- Do more practice talks out loud. I am not kidding. You need
to get used to hearing your own voice. Also the timing and the wording
in difficult places will only fall into place if you practice out
loud. It might also be helpful to record your presentation and
listen to it afterward to detect any kind of hiccup, places where you
got lost, and similar problems. The more you practice the more
confident you will about with your presentation and the less nervous
you will be.
In order to allow you to use presentation software, I will make sure
that a data projector is available during your presentation. You can
also use my laptop for presentation, or you could bring your own if
you prefer that.
There are several choices of presentation software you could use:
- LaTeX/SliTeX/PDF/Acrobat. SliTeX is slide package for LaTeX. You
can convert the result to PDF and use Acroread as presentation
software. I personally find this a bit cumbersome, but there are a
number of faculty and grad students in the department who wouldn't use
anything else.
- Microsoft Powerpoint. The de-facto standard in presentation
programs.
Watch out for font problems if you create the presentation on a
different computer than you will use for the presentation.
If you plan to use my laptop, please let me know in the previous
lecture. Also, please either send me your presentation file(s) by
email at least 2 hours before the lecture so I have time to put
them on the laptop, or bring it on a USB stick.
As for the slide layout, here are a couple of simple rules of thumb:
- Keep it simple.
There are some visually very complex presentation templates that ship
with both Powerpoint. Don't use those - they just tend
to cause visual overload and make the actual content harder to
read.
- Use colors of hight contrast.
The background and the foreground should have large a difference in
intensity. Colors that differ only in hue, but not in intensity are
not a good choice, but white on blue, white on black, black on
white, and similar schemes work well. Stay away from red on blue, even
though that combination shows up in a bunch of standard templates. If
you want to use an image as a background for the slides, make sure
that the contrast within the image is much lower than the contrast
between the image and the text. You might also want to turn the
saturation of the colors in the image way down.
- Use as many visual components as possible.
This is a presentation on graphics. There usually is some way to
present the topic graphically, rather than as a series of text. Have a
look at the slides that are posted by the original authors. They
usually have excellent visual representations, as well as little
animations that help communicate the most important ideas.
- Use sans-serif fonts.
While serif fonts such as Times are preferable for long texts, slides
are easier to read in sans-serif fonts such as Helvetica or Arial.
- Use large fonts.
Most presentation templates use appropriate font sizes of at least 20
point or more. Don't make the font size smaller to fit more on a
slide!
- Use itemized style.
Short, itemized lists are easier to read on a slide than full
sentences.
During the Presentation
OK, so you have prepared your slides and you have practiced your
presentation. Nothing can go wrong now, if you follow two simple
rules during the talk:
- If you need to indicate a location on the slide, point to the
projection screen, instead of fiddling around with the mouse pointer
(our room is small enough you can just point with your hands - in a
conference talk you'd use a laser pointer). If you use the mouse
pointer, you can accidentally trigger operations such as advancing the
slide, or terminating the presentation. It is also easier for the
audience to follow your hand and your gestures than following a mouse
pointer.
- Face the audience. This sounds obvious, but sometimes it is easy
to get carried away and face mostly to the screen. If you need to look
at the slides in order to know what to talk about next, try looking at
the laptop screen in front of you, rather than the projection screen
behind you.
Instructor: Wolfgang Heidrich
