533C Presentations


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Your presentations on the readings will take place in the second half of the course. Only the presenter is required to do the additional readings for a topic, although all students are welcome to do so. (Obsolete info: Most days there will be two people independently presenting, and each person should plan to take 35 minutes, including some time for class discussion. You should choose three papers for each topic from the list below, and pick two more on your own.)

March 1 amendment: Because of the large class size, three people per class session will present, with 25 minutes each. I will give you two papers, you pick one more on your own.

March 8 amendment: Please send me the URL (if available online) and bibliographic citation of the paper you choose.

March 10 amendment: If you are using your own laptop, please send me a note by noon the day of your presentation telling me this.

Topics

Topic and Time Signup

Send me your top three topic choices, and if desired up veto up to three days on which you do not want to present, by Tuesday March 2 at 5pm. I will send out the schedule and paper lists soon after that.

Content

Your presentation should not simply outline the papers. You will need to present the critical ideas in the paper so that your colleagues in the class have a basis for understanding your subsequent discussion. Part of this assignment is to use your judgement on what those critical ideas are and how to concisely present them. You should compare the approaches of the five papers, by a specific discussion of their relative strengths and weaknesses. Critique whether the proposed tools and techniques in these papers actually solve the intended domain problem.

Showing a demo or a video of one of the systems in action can be very helpful to show your colleagues the look and feel of an interactive system. If you want do this and plan to use my laptop to present, contact me in advance (at least the day before) so that we can sort whether the demo will indeed run. Please inform me in advance if you will require a VCR during your presentation.

Note that this presentation style is quite different from what was assigned in last year's course, so do not simply follow the previous style.

Slides

You should prepare slides to accompany your talk. Last year's course has many good examples of student presentations. You may use the software platform of your choice to present these slides, as long as it's also possible to provide a cross-platform readable version of your talk for the course web site: for instance, HTML+images, or PDF. PowerPoint is fine (it's easiest for you to give me the PowerPoint file, and then I generate the HTML+images from it).

Do not send me large files via email. You should post your course-related materials (slides, assignments, proposals, final project reports) on your personal web site, and send me the URL. I will then upload your work to the course web site, so that it is archivally available. If you don't already have a personal site, see the webpage setup section of the CS Dept FAQ for how to set one up in the CS domain.

You may use my laptop for presentations, it can run either Linux or Windows. If you need to use anything except for PDF or PowerPoint, check with me in advance to make sure that the required software is installed on my machine. Slides are due on the day of class:

Also send me the URL (or citation) of your chosen third paper.

Presentation Preparation

For advice on giving technical talks, see
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Tamara Munzner
Last modified: Tue Mar 9 09:55:53 PST 2004