CS739 Project Presentations Important details Presentation Day: To be determined. Talk Length: 20 minutes, including questions. To keep us on schedule, I will have to cut you off after 20 minutes. Slides Due: To be determined. Prepare your talk in PowerPoint and send me a URL link to it by 11 am Friday morning. This way, I can make sure everything will go smoothly. Bring a printout of slides for me! Both partners must present (how you divide the talking is up to you). Hopefully, a good chunk of the work is finished by this time, but it is definitely okay if it is not all complete. Your final paper with all results is due the following week. Overview Both you and your partner need to make a final presentation of your research project in front of the class. A good talk will include a clear statement of the problem you are studying, a discussion of how you went about investigating the problem, results (graphs), and conclusions. A Sample Outline When preparing your talk, I would suggest using the following outline for your slides. Introduction and Problem Statement. What problem are you are trying to solve? In most talks, you would want to spend a significant amount of time motivating your problem. But, since everyone in the class has already heard your general problem statement, you can keep this relatively brief. Approach. How did you approach the problem? What is your methodology? Why is this a good way to approach the problem? Results. What have you found out? Present experimental results here. Make sure to both describe what you are measuring, and draw appropriate conclusions. ("Here is a graph showing the performance of our file system under a write-intensive workload. The x-axis varies the file size, and the y-axis shows the time to create a file of the particular size. Each data point is the average of 30 runs. As you can see from the graph, our fancy file system is pretty darn fast.") Conclusions. What did you learn from the process? What should others take away from what you did? Both specific ("Under our six benchmarks, MyLogFS performed 10-50% worse than Ext2FS") and general ("Perhaps log-structured file systems, while excellent under micro-benchmarks, do not measure up under real workloads") conclusions. Note that conclusions are different than a summary; a summary is what you did whereas conclusions are what you learned. General Advice Repeat the important stuff. When hearing a talk, it is easy for the listener to miss small parts of what you are saying. Thus, try to pick out the most important results and highlight them, perhaps once at the beginning of the talk, once when you actually present the result, and then once again at the conclusion. Use outlines to form structure. Sometimes it is hard for the audience to follow a talk without help. One useful thing to do is to use an "outline" slide to describe the structure of the talk. After presenting the "talk within the talk", I usually put up an outline slide to show the structure of the rest of the talk. Then, as I go through each section, I might put up the outline of the talk again, to show the audience where we are, and how much further we have to go. Present graphs and experiments clearly. One of the most frustrating aspects of presentations occurs when the presenter does not take the time to explain the results that they are presenting. If you show a graph, explain the experiment, and make sure to explain the graph (what each axis plots, what different lines on the same graph refer to, etc.). Get the timing right. This is a 20 minute talk. Do not have 20 or more slides of real content! You are on a tight budget here, so make sure that you do not go over the allotted time. The key thing to do: practice beforehand, so that you get the timing down. You will be cut off if you run long. Above all else, practice, practice, practice! The best way to give a good talk is to give it more than once (in other words, give a bad talk to yourself, improve it, and give a better one to others). Practice aloud and preferably in front of other people. Practicing is certainly the best way to get the timing down. Practicing in front of people not familiar with your work is the best way to make sure your presentation is clear. It's often surprised me how much a talk improves simply by going through it aloud even just once before presenting the real thing. Advice From Others Mark Hill's advice on oral presentations Dave Patterson's "How to give a bad talk" talk