Tips for Paper Presentation

First, organize your talk:

1. Identify the important ideas: Your work (or the work you are presenting) likely
has many details but only one or two main ideas; structure your talk around these
main ideas.
2. Create a Talk Outline: Your talk should be organized in a top-down manner.
You should have the following main sections in your talk:
o Introduction, The Big Picture: what, why, how, and why we should care
(motivation). Be sure to include:
 a statement of the problem being solved (what)
 motivation and putting the work in context (why and why should
we care)
 a high-level view of the solution (how)
o Details of solution
o Results demonstrating/proving your solution
o Critique of Work (possibly compare to related work)
o Conclusions & Future Directions for this work

The talk should be organized as the important ideas first, the details second,
conclusions last. Each section of your talk should be organized in a similar manor:
high-level important points first, details second, summarize high-level points last.
Next, Design your slides

1. Slide Organization Your slides should be organized like an outline--a few main
points, with sub points under each one. Your slides are a guide for your talk not a
word-for-word copy of your talk. List specific points that you want to talk about
as sub-topics of each main topic. If there are particular details that you want to
discuss, outline them on the slide and keep written notes for you to refer to in
your talk rather than writing all the details on the slide.
2. Summarize Main Points You should have a summary slide of the main ideas at
the end. If applicable, include a list of open questions and/or future directions of
your work.
3. It is okay to waste space Add just enough prose to present the main points and
highlight the main parts of each point. Use phrases rather than complete sentences
and use large fonts. You can use acronyms and abbreviations sparingly; however
you should say the complete name when you talk about them. For example, if you
abbreviate processes to procs on a slide, say "processes" when you talk about the
point not "procs". Similarly, if your create an acronym for your super fast multi-
cast implementation, SFMC, and refer to the old slow multi-cast implementation
as OSMC, then say "our super fast multi-cast" and "the old slow multi-cast" rather
than "SFMC" and "OSMC". The exception is for well-known acronyms such as
PVM, MPI, API, JVM, etc.
4. A picture is worth a thousand words Use figures and graphs to explain
implementation and results. It is very hard to describe a system implementation
without having a picture of the components of the system.
5. Number of Slides As a general rule, it should take 2-3 minutes to talk through the
material on one slide, so for a 30 minute talk you should have about 13 slides.
6. If there are too many ideas in your work to present completely in 30 minutes, then
pick one or two (the most interesting/important parts) that you will discuss in
detail, and present the other parts at a higher level. Also, you can create back-up
slides for specific details that you don't plan to talk about, but may get questions
about.
Next, preparing your presentation

1. Provide a talk road-map Tell the audience where you are going with your talk.
o Give audience a road-map of your talk at the beginning by using outline
slides immediately after the title slide, put up an outline slide and tell the
audience the main organization of your talk. Another alternative is to first
have a few slides motivating the paper's general topic, then put up an
outline slide giving the audience a road-map of your talk.
o It should be clear when you start a new high-level part of your talk
Use good transitions from one slide to the next and from one main topic to
the next..."We just talked about the implementation of foo now we will
look at how well foo performs for synthetic and real workloads.
You may want to use the outline slide at other points in your talk to
provide a visual transition between parts of your talk.
2. Repeat Your Point There is a rule that says you have to tell your audience
something three times before they really hear it:

1. Tell them what you are going to say.

2. Say it.
3. Summarize what you said.

This is particularly important for figures and graphs. For example:

4. This graph show how the A algorithm performs better than the B and C
algorithms as the number of nodes increase
5. The X axis is number of nodes, the Y axis is execution time in seconds
The red curve shows the execution time of A as the number of nodes
increases The blue curve shows ...
6. Thus you can see that as the number of nodes increases above N, the A
algorithm performs better. This is because of increased message traffic in
algorithms B and C as shown on the next slide...
7. Talk to the Audience Don't read your slide off the screen, nor directly off
the projector. It is okay to stop for a second and refer to your notes if you
need to.
8. Practice Give a practice run-through of your talk in front of an audience
of at least one other student. Stand in a room for 30 minutes (or the
duration of your talk) and talk through all your slides (out loud). This
should be a timed dress rehearsal (don't stop and fix slides as you go and
don't let your audience ask questions or suggest fixes until your practice
talk is over; you want to force yourself to talk through your entire talk).

You should assume that there will be about 5-10 minutes worth of
questions during or after your talk. If your talk is too long, you should cut
out some material to get it to fit into the time slot (your audience will not
mind if your talk ends 5 minutes early, but they sure will mind if it goes 5
minutes over). Even if it is not too long, you should think about slides that
you can skip during your talk if it ends up going too long.

As a practice talk audience member, you should jot down notes of places
in the talk where you have suggestions for improvements, or where
something seems unclear. After the presenter is done with his/her practice
talk, you should talk through the things you wrote down. It is also good to
give the presenter some practice answering audience questions. If you can
think of some questions like this, it is good to ask these to the presenter at
the end of his/her talk.

9. Nervousness: How to fight back

 A well organized, practiced talk will almost always go well. If you
draw a blank, then looking at your slides will help you get back on
track.
 Taking a deep breath will clam you down. One trick is to try to
remember to take a deep breath between each slide.
 Slow down. Take a few seconds to think about a question that is
being asked before you answer it. It is okay to pause for a few
seconds between points and between slides; a second or two of
silence between points is noticeable only to you, but if you are
talking a mile a minute everyone will notice.
 Bring notes. If you are afraid that you will forget a point or will
forget your elegant transition between slides 11 and 12, write these
down on a piece of paper and bring it with you. However, you
don't want to have a verbatim copy of your talk, instead write
down key phrases that you want to remember to say.
 Give at least one practice talk to an audience.
 Be prepared to answer questions. You don't have to know the
answer to every question, however you should be prepared to
answer questions and able to answer most questions about your
work. Before you give the talk, think about what questions you are
likely to get, and how you would answer them. You may want to
have back-up slides ready for answering certain questions.
 It is okay to say "I don't know" or better yet "gee, I hadn't thought
about that, but one possible approach would be to..." or to refer to
your notes to answer questions.