Sunday, July 26, 2015

How to present a regular paper in 15 minutes

  • The purpose of presentation is to impress the potential readers of your paper, not to let them understand your paper in 15 minutes.
  • Example organization: 
    • Motivation (e.g., show a running example)
    • Related work and contribution
    • Background and overview
    • Explain the main approaches/results
    • Experimental results (if any)
    • Conclusions (e.g., summary and future work)
  • Use short and simple sentences on your slides. 
  • Use charts and diagrams instead of texts whenever possible.
  • Each slide should have a clear purpose. Remove all slides likely to confuse the audience.
  • Present the materials that your audiences (NOT you) are interested in.
    • They only care about how helpful your paper is for them.
  • Try to skip technical results and use high-level descriptions.
    • Most of the audience only care about the key ideas. 
    • Put the details in backup slides for Q&A.
  • Make sure your audience can follow you to the last slide.
    • Try to use a running example to explain your approaches.
    • Recall definitions, formulas, theorems, etc., upon distant references.