Presentations

##Goals To help students learn to clearly communicate technical material with others.

##Format Students will present papers in groups of three. Presenters will prepare a 30-35 minute talk on the paper(s) that he or she presents that week. Slides for the talk must be submitted via CourSys by 10:00PM the night before the class. The presenters also lead another 20-30 minutes of discussion during/after the talk. For this, the presenter will prepare questions that lead to a deeper analysis of the paper's content, presentation, strengths, and weaknesses. Students do not need to write critiques for weeks in which they present. You may adapt slides from other presentations as long as you acknowledge your sources.

• Prepare ~15 slides. This does not count animations or other techniques to explain or illustrate the technique within a slide.
• Illustrate how the technique works. Use an example, whether concrete or abstract. Do not explain the technique with verbose writing.
• Consider the strengths and weaknesses. Is the technique reasonable? Is the evaluation realistic?
• Prepare discussion questions.
• Be prepared to answer questions. The talk should fuel discussion and problems that we will work through together. As much as possible, the presenters should act as expert consultants during these discussions.

##Grading I shall evaluate your talk on a ten point scale. There is one bonus point available. Most talks should receive a ten.

• 4 points for clearly explaining the ideas in the paper.
• 3 points for clear, well organized slides.
• 3 points for leading stimulating discussion.
• 1 point for exceeding my expectations in some area.

##Extra Guidelines When presenting a paper, you should do your best to understand it. This likely means that you will need to read the paper well in advance and perhaps discuss it with me. Your presentation should be a distilation of what you learned so that other students may better understand it. You do not need to understand the entirety of a paper, but you should understand the majority. Parts that were unclear or subtle make for excellent discussion material in class.

For your own benefit, and that of your audience, you should present a paper that interests you. You should select it and inform me of your decision well in advance. You can also select a paper that will be related to your term project in order to double your own value from presenting.

_{^{This guide for presentations comes courtesy of Antony Hosking}}