Transcript How to Give an Academic Talk

How to Give a Good CS
Presentation
CS311
Fall 2016
Key Points
1) Know your audience
2) Be clear and concise
3) Important Tips
4) What Not to Do
Know Your Audience
• Tailor the presentation to your audience
• Think about:
– What they know (e.g. Breadth-First Search)
Skip it
– What they know but may not remember (e.g. A*
Search)
Review it
– What they don’t know (e.g. Block A* Search)
Explain it
Know Your Audience
• Tailor the presentation to your audience
• Think about:
– What they know (e.g. Breadth-First Search)
Skip it
– What they know but may not remember (e.g. A*
Search)
Review it
– What they don’t know (e.g. Block A* Search)
Explain it
Clarity is Key
• Be Clear and Concise
• Help your audience understand the topic as
well as you do
How?
Clarity is Key
• Be Clear and Concise
• Help your audience understand the topic as
well as you do
• Provide pictures + visuals
Label/Caption Figures
Label x and y
coordinates!
Figure 1: Preferences for Nicest Fruit
Add captions
to figures!
Clarity is Key
• Be Clear and Concise
• Help your audience understand the topic as
well as you do
• Provide pictures + visuals
• Rule of 1/3s:
– 1/3: Text
– 1/3: Technical (pseudocode, examples)
– 1/3: Pictures
Clarity is Key
• Be Clear and Concise
• Help your audience understand the topic as
well as you do
• Provide pictures + visuals
• Rule of 1/3s:
– 1/3: Text
– 1/3: Technical (pseudocode, examples)
– 1/3: Pictures
• Provide simple worked-out examples
Examples help a lot!
This is how our neural network performs on the
following input…
This is how our algorithm would solve the
following puzzle…
What Not To Do
Avoid long blocks of text
In computer science, A* (pronounced as "A star" ( listen)) is a
computer algorithm that is widely used in pathfinding and graph
traversal, the process of plotting an efficiently traversable path
between multiple points, called nodes. It enjoys widespread use due
to its performance and accuracy. However, in practical travel-routing
systems, it is generally outperformed by algorithms which can preprocess the graph to attain better performance,[1] although other
work has found A* to be superior to other approaches.[2] Peter Hart,
Nils Nilsson and Bertram Raphael of Stanford Research Institute (now
SRI International) first described the algorithm in 1968.[3] It is an
extension of Edsger Dijkstra's 1959 algorithm. A* achieves better
performance by using heuristics to guide its search.
What Not To Do
Avoid complicated diagrams
Avoid complex pseudocode
PowerPoint Tips
• Keep each slide simple (Rule of 1/3s)
– At most 5 bullets per slide
• Use animation to illustrate examples
• Do not read from your slides
PowerPoint: What Not To Do
• This is a very bad way to use the animation
features of PowerPoint. Please don’t do this. It
is terrible to watch a talk like this. I know from
experience. Thanks.
Another (Powerpoint) Tip…
• John Wooden’s 8 P’s to Success:
- Plan
- Practice
- Practice
- Practice
- Practice
- Yup…3 more Practices
Webpage Presentation Tip
• If possible, provide GUI for demo
 Try our game
Webpage Presentation Tip
• If not possible, show screenshots, etc.