Guidance Notes On Presenting a Paper

Each week 1-3 students will present research papers in the area of data mining. You should plan to talk for about 10-12 minutes, with 3-5 minutes for questions after. You should meet with Dr. Welsh before your presentation to go over any questions you have about the paper or your presentation.

Note: For students not presenting on a given day, reading the papers ahead of time will allow you to ask informed questions and better understand each student presentation.
Grading Rubric for Presentations

Outline:

Objective

what is the goal of this work, what problem is addressed, what was the current state of the art, who is the work aimed at?

Proposal

if this paper presents a new idea, what, in a nutshell, is it?

Contributions/claims

what contributions does the paper claim to make? Which one is the most significant?

Evidence

how does the paper support its claims? Theorems? Case studies? Simulations? Benchmarks?
Does the evidence presented address the key issues needed to support the claims being made?

Shoulders of giants...

what previous research does this work build on? What are the key underlying theoretical ideas? What software infrastructure made the experimental work possible? Could this work have been done earlier - if not, why not?

Impact

has this work been influential? When later research papers cite it, what contribution is being referred to? Has the work influenced engineering practice? Is money being made from this idea? Could it be? If not, why not? Has the work been superceded? Is it still relevant or have events passed it by?

Hints for giving a presentation

Use powerpoint, use the video projector, and put your presentation on the web so you can access it without having to log in. If you email your slides to me before/after class, I can post them online for others to view.

Point at the projector screen, facing the audience

Don't be embarrassed about taking time to think

Don't be shy about reading the words written on the slide

Never use Powerpoint's animation feature (if you want the slide to change, use the "insert duplicate slide" feature)

Never use animated bullet points

If there are slides which you have prepared, but which you think we won't have time for, move them to the end of the presentation, after a blank slide. Then you can refer to them if discussion/questions require it (actually I am suggesting this in order to ease the pain of removing a slide which turns out to be too complicated, detailed or exceeds the time available).

Other people's (no doubt better) hints on giving a talk:

http://www.comm.toronto.edu/~frank/guide/guide0.html

http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~mturk/Misc/HowToGiveATalk.htm

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/conference-talk.html