Presentation Skills Padma Raghavan Penn State

1. Presentation SkillsPadma RaghavanPenn State CRA-W Grad Cohort 2013 Thanks to: Margaret Martonosi Princeton University CRA-W Graduate Cohort 2011

2. Why do Presentation Skills Matter ? • Explaining important ideas and results • Explaining difficult technical concepts • to colleagues • in a classroom • Giving talks at conferences, academia, …. • Getting “capital” to pursue new ideas • Interviewing for jobs

3. Forums for Communicating Your Ideas • Oral • 25-minute conference talk • “elevator pitch” or hallway conversation • Poster session • Thesis defense • Job interview • Written • Conference or journal paper • Dissertation • Proposals to funding agencies

4. About this Presentation • General tips for oral presentations: Version I • Examples • General tips for oral presentations: Version II • From The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley • Summary

5. General tips: Version I

6. Before You Start, Consider! • Who is the audience? • Why are they here? • What is their background? • What will they know or not know? • What do you want to achieve? • Teach them something? • Change their minds about something? • Get them to read your paper? • Convince someone to hire you?

7. The Four Questions • What • is the problem? • Why • is it important? • What • have others done ? • have I done ? • How • is it useful, novel, interesting, different…

8. Good Oral Presentations Have… • Content • Do you know your material really well? • Design • Are the materials organized well ? • How are you going to drive home key points? • Can you illustrate with figures or graphs? • Delivery • Do you know what you will say along with each slide? • How long will it take?

9. Conference Talks: Basics • What is the goal? • Get audience interested so they will read paper • What to do in 25 minutes? • Focus on the 4 questions • What it is the problem, Why is it important, What have others done, what have you done, How is it important, interesting …. • What not to do in 25 minutes? • Try to cover ALL the details • Speak fast to cram it ALL in • Read off your slides

10. Structure of a 25-Minute Talk • Title/author/affiliation (1 slide) • Problem statement (1-2 slides) (What) • Motivation (1-2 slides) (Why) • Related work (1 slide) (What have others done) • Main ideas (6-8 slides) (What you have done) • Analysis and insights (3-4 slides) (How is it important) • Summary & future work (1 slide)

11. The Beginning • Tell the audience where we are going • Tell the audience why we are going there

12. The Middle • Logically explain your main contribution • Use figures/charts to illustrate key ideas • Demonstrate the value of your work • Compare with the state of the art • Show evaluations on a model problem

13. The End • Conclusions • Don’t just repeat what you did • Use this to place your work in the broader context • What are the implications of what you did? • What did you learn? • Conclusions as Takeaway Message • What is the ONE thing you want the audience to remember? • If you give them 6, they remember none

14. After the End: Q&A • During the Question Session • Repeat/rephrase each question asked • Why? • If they ask “Did you try XYZ…” • “No.” • “No, but …. • we tried ABC and saw that it only helped by 5% which led us to surmise that XYZ would also perform similarly”

15. Useful Resources Oral: • David Patterson: How to Give a Bad Talkhttp://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/conference-talk.html#badtalk • Mark Hill’s “Oral Presentation Advice”, http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/conference-talk.html • CRA-W, http://www.cra-w.org/gradcohort • http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/02/03/out_loud.html • http://www.slideshare.net/selias22/taking-your-slide-deck-to-the-next-level • http://www.presentationzen.com/ Written: • Strunk & White “The Elements of Style” • Gopen & Swan “The Science of Scientific Writing” http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/the-science-of-scientific-writing/9 • Many schools provide many writing resources: Use them! • Writing center or tutor. • Also, it may be worthwhile to *pay* a writing tutor to help teach you and edit your work, in order to make your overall idea-to-paper process easier! General: Female Science Professor blog! http://science-professor.blogspot.com/

16. Examples

17. A Good Talk is like a good museum tour… • Information at the right time, at the right level • A bad talk is like a bad museum tour • Uninformative, hard to hear, hardto understand… • Goes on and on • You are trapped, bored ….

18. A Bad Talk ….. From: Giving an Academic Talk, by Jonathan Shewchuk

19. Another Bad Talk ….. From: Giving an Academic Talk, by Jonathan Shewchuk

20. Related Work– Version I • “A reasonable approach to page coloring” • ASPLOS ‘06 • “Another page coloring idea” • OSDI ’08 • “Yet another page coloring idea” • ASPLOS ‘07

21. Related Work– Version II System Changes Required Foundational Idea... Journal of … ‘72 Jones et al. OSDI ‘08 Smith et al. ASPLOS ‘06 This Paper Runtime Overhead Spatial display of design space can visually highlight what are your novel claims Can you show an optimality limit and show how different prior papers approached that limit? Where will your work be?

22. Accuracy –Version I

23. No major accuracy loss due to jumping as measured by two metrics (Jeffrey divergence & rank error rate) Result is accurate within 10% Hot Page Identification AccuracyVersion II

24. Quick search for K-th hottest page’s hotness Bin[ i ][ j ] indicates # of pages in coloriwith normalized hotness in [ j, j+1] range Re-coloring Procedure --Version I

25. Re-coloring Procedure –Version II hot warm cold Cache share decrease Budget = 2 pages Old colors Subtract colors

26. General tips for oral presentations: Version II • from: • The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley

27. The following slides are by:Michael Alleyat Penn State http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/handbook/presvisuals.html

28. Presentations have several advantages over documents Work can come alive for audience Work C A Presenter can read audience and react B D C ? ! ? Presenter receives instant reaction !

29. Presentations also have several disadvantages ? ? ? Speaker has limited chance to catch errors audience Audience cannot reread text has one chance to hear Audience cannot look up background material

30. Presentations can be viewed from three stylistic perspectives Structure and Speech Visual Aids Delivery Archives, Cal-Tech

31. who are they? what do they know? why are they here? what biases do they have? You begin preparing a scientific presentation by analyzing your constraints audience to inform to persuade to inspire to teach formality size time purpose occasion

32. As with documents, the structure of presentations should have clear beginnings, middles, and ends B e g i n n i n g E n d i n g Middle

33. Beginnings prepare the audiencefor the work to be presented Shows importance Defines work Work = A + B Maps presentation Gives background B C A D

34. The middle presents the workin a logical order pre-combustion methods combustion methods post-combustion methods

35. In the middle, you make smooth transitions between major points pre-combustion methods combustion methods combustion methods post-combustion methods

36. The ending summarizes main points and places those results in the context of the big picture point 5 point 6 point 7 point 8 point 1 point 2 point 3 point 4 point 1 point 7 Summary Big Picture

37. Summary • Know your audience • Decide what you want to achieve • Plan • Content, Design and Delivery • to match audience expectations , and • accomplish your goals