CS97: Final Presentations

Reviews

Submit your reviews to me via email using the following form as a template. For the comments in IIIA, please be sure to clearly label what question above you are referring to or you'll end up confusing the author.

• review-form

Remember that doing this review is part of the requirements for the course and is intended to help the author of the paper, so please put some time and effort into your review. If you have a suggestion for an author, but don't want to be associated with the comment, include it in IIIB and I'll take care of it.

Presentations

You'll be making presentations of you projects on Dec 6 and 8 in CS 240 according to the following schedule:

I'll have my laptop there so you can show Powerpoint slides, and I do want a copy of the slides before your presentation so that I can have them pre-loaded on the laptop.

You'll be able to use the computer at the front of the room to do any "live" demonstrations that you think appropriate.

Here is my idea for how to break down your talk. Feel free to change this around to fit your personal style and/or project.

1. Introduce yourself - Hopefully we'll have some new faces in the crowd.


2. General Background - Include enough information so that the audience can follow the rest of your talk, but don't get bogged down in details. They don't need to know enough to reproduce the work or determine if what you did was "right".


3. Motivation - Why did you pick this project? Why do you think it is interesting? Why should the audience be interested? This might be part of the background presentation.


4. Project - What did you do, and how did you do it? Again, don't get stuck in the details, but explain the general design and process.


5. Results - What were the results that were gathered? Did the data you get match your expectations? This is the most important part of your talk.


6. Conclusions and future work - Did you accomplish your goals? Be explicit about what you learned through your experimentations. If you think your project didn't work, why did you think it didn't.


7. Ask for questions - Have a slide that marks the end of your talk.


8. Supplemental material - Think of a couple of items you might want to expand on if you find that you are going to be ending early. Or consider possible questions that the audience might ask. Having a couple of slides after you "Questions" slide is often useful and will impress your audience. If you find you need to shorten your talk, you might move some of the more detailed slides here.

   This is a great place to have extra graphs and charts that you can use to explain your results other than the ones that you used in previous presentation.

Suggestions for presentations

Things to consider for your presentation in no particular order:

• Limit number of slides - You should spend about 2-5 minutes per slide. That means that you probably won't have more than 15 slides.


• Limit amount of text on slides - Keep the slides simple and to the point. Busy text on a slide is impossible to read. If you must, try to find a way to emphasize which point you are talking about as you go through it (appear/fade points?).


• Don't just read from slides - Have the main point on the slides and expand on them in your presentation itself.


• Pictures are better than words - A graph or illustration is often more effective at conveying information than a paragraph of text. Plus, it is more interesting to look at.


• Use color to emphasize - Try to keep to most of your formatting the same between slides, but selectively use color to emphasize a key idea or point. Certain colors don't work on a projection screen, so be careful of your choices (red on blue looks fine on a monitor, but is unreadable when projected). Also, sans-serif fonts are much more readable for slides.


• Animations are distracting - Too much motion detracts from the talk and just seems tacky.


• Use examples - Keep your audience engaged by using specific examples and analogies.


• Prepare in advance - Run through your talk a couple of times out loud. You don't have to have an audience, but the practice really helps. "Winging-it" will be pretty obvious during the presentation.


• Leave time for questions - people will want to ask about your work


• Relax!!! - This is supposed to be fun.

Last Modified: December 02, 2005 - Benjamin A. Kuperman